Dr. Reid Bryson Disputes Man-Made Climate Change

A good article on one of the fathers of climate science. About that dreaded carbon dioxide:

Q: Could you rank the things that have the most significant impact and where would you put carbon dioxide on the list?

A: Well let me give you one fact first. In the first 30 feet of the atmosphere, on the average, outward radiation from the Earth, which is what CO2 is supposed to affect, how much [of the reflected energy] is absorbed by water vapor? In the first 30 feet, 80 percent, okay?

Q: Eighty percent of the heat radiated back from the surface is absorbed in the first 30 feet by water vapor…

A: And how much is absorbed by carbon dioxide? Eight hundredths of one percent. One one-thousandth as important as water vapor. You can go outside and spit and have the same effect as doubling carbon dioxide.

And about prior climate changes:

“All this argument is the temperature going up or not, it’s absurd,” Bryson continues. “Of course it’s going up. It has gone up since the early 1800s, before the Industrial Revolution, because we’re coming out of the Little Ice Age, not because we’re putting more carbon dioxide into the air.”

Little Ice Age? That’s what chased the Vikings out of Greenland after they’d farmed there for a few hundred years during the Mediaeval Warm Period, an earlier run of a few centuries when the planet was very likely warmer than it is now, without any help from industrial activity in making it that way. What’s called “proxy evidence”—assorted clues extrapolated from marine sediment cores, pollen specimens, and tree-ring data—helps reconstruct the climate in those times before instrumental temperature records existed.

We ask about that evidence, but Bryson says it’s second-tier stuff. “Don’t talk about proxies,” he says. “We have written evidence, eyeball evidence. When Eric the Red went to Greenland, how did he get there? It’s all written down.”

Bryson describes the navigational instructions provided for Norse mariners making their way from Europe to their settlements in Greenland. The place was named for a reason: The Norse farmed there from the 10th century to the 13th, a somewhat longer period than the United States has existed. But around 1200 the mariners’ instructions changed in a big way. Ice became a major navigational reference. Today, old Viking farmsteads are covered by glaciers.

Bryson mentions the retreat of Alpine glaciers, common grist for current headlines. “What do they find when the ice sheets retreat, in the Alps?”

We recall the two-year-old report saying a mature forest and agricultural water-management structures had been discovered emerging from the ice, seeing sunlight for the first time in thousands of years. Bryson interrupts excitedly.

“A silver mine! The guys had stacked up their tools because they were going to be back the next spring to mine more silver, only the snow never went,” he says. “There used to be less ice than now. It’s just getting back to normal.”

Trouble With Atheism

Rod Liddle argues against those who turn to atheism for a rational and moderate approach to today's problems, and says that atheism has high priests and dogmatic beliefs, just like fundamentalist religion.

George Tenet and his book: "Was That a Storm That Just Went By?"

Douglas Feith makes an interesting point:

Mr. Tenet makes a peculiar claim of detachment, as if he had not been a top official in the Bush administration. He wants readers not to blame him for the president's decision to invade Iraq. He implies that he never supported it and never even heard it debated. Mr. Tenet writes: "In many cases, we were not aware of what our own government was trying to do. The one thing we were certain of was that our warnings were falling on deaf ears."

Mr. Tenet's point here builds on the book's much-publicized statements that the author never heard the president and his national-security team debate "the imminence of the Iraqi threat," whether or not it was "wise to go to war" or when the war should start. He paints a distorted picture here.

But even if it were true that he never heard any such debate and was seriously dissatisfied with the dialogue in the White House Situation Room, he had hundreds of opportunities to improve the discussion by asking questions or making comments. I sat with him in many of the meetings, and no one prevented him from talking. It is noteworthy that Mr. Tenet met with the president for an intelligence briefing six days every week for years. Why didn't he speak up if he thought that the president was dangerously wrong or inadequately informed?

One of Mr. Tenet's main arguments is that he was somehow disconnected from the decision to go to war. Under the circumstances, it seems odd that he would call his book "At the Center of the Storm." He should have called it "At the Periphery of the Storm" or maybe: "Was That a Storm That Just Went By?"

"Sane" Academics in an Insane World

I had an interesting and revealing exchange on Jeff Goldberg’s blog Protein Wisdom recently with a professor at Virginian Tech – Bob_R - on the subject of the massacre there and the school policy regarding guns. (Scroll down to the comments. I'm "Moneyrunner")

What I found most telling about the exchange was the whiff of hysteria that evidenced itself in the professor’s writings. He identifies himself as a professor of mathematics, a discipline that I viewed as very structured, very “disciplined.” A math prof is not someone I would expect to go off on flights of rhetorical hyperbole.

But heat up the rhetoric he did. He begins:

I am a Virginia Tech professor and a Blacksburg resident. Boortz is, of course, free to use the fresh blood or our students and faculty to make his political points and increase the profits of radio network. Jeff is, of course, free to suggest that by getting yourself elected to a part time position as a state legislator you forfeit the right to suggest to local radio stations (over which you have no legal control) that they would be better off not employing someone who had the bad taste to call 32 dead people cowards before their bodies had a chance to cool.

Note the reference to “fresh blood of our students” and the cooling bodies of Tech students.

But as the thread progresses we see that he’s more than a little sensitive about the views expressed about academics, referring to comments regarding academics he accuses me of creating:

rigid little narrative about liberal academia

And doesn’t want you to think that the teachers at Tech are anti-gun wusses:

We have great hunting around here, and gun ownership within the faculty is relatively high. Despite that, I would guess that handgun ownership is relatively low.

Referring to Tech as a “gun free zone” he comments:

A lot has been made about the “gun - free” rule. In principle, I agree. But I’ve asked other members of the faculty, and none of us can remember when this rule passed. The fact is that I don’t know of anyone who kept a gun on campus before the rule - it is like they passed a rule prohibiting serving haggis for lunch. No one noticed. There is simply so little violence and crime here that almost everyone judged the inherent risks of carrying a gun as worse than the benefits.

He gets back to Neil Boortz. He characterized his comments as “Vile Insults.”

The implication that they were “wusses” because they (with varying degrees of success) barricaded their doors rather than having organized a counterattack is a vile insult

.
To demonstrated how he is one with the people, he tells us that:

But I like venison, know a lot of hunters, and have admired a lot of gun cabinets.

And does not like to be lumped in with other academics:

We don’t all fit you simplistic little stereotype.

And he is at his best when building straw men:

I’m all for the right to bear arms. I simply don’t have an unrealistic, romantic idea that it will protect me from all dangers. And I don’t hurl insults at a bunch of people who are spending a big chunk of their time going to funerals in order make a point I am interested in in a situation where it doesn’t really apply.

And:

The idea that the only genuine support for the second amendment is a religious belief that it solves all problems of violence is ... well I guess I’m just never going to measure up to your messianic standards.

And:

But more specifically, your scenario of how the army of citizen soldiers would have stopped Cho simply exposes your ignorance of the specific situation and would be a good Exhibit A in any demonstration that second amendment purists have “silly romantic” notions of how it works in practice.

Regarding a comment about the tenured faculty at Duke in their public demonization of the lacrosse players before the case was brought to trial, he’s defensive about the issue of tenure:

I didn’t know I had to prove my loyalty by writing a 12 page essay on what idiots the Duke 88 are.

What’s interesting about Bob_R is that he is probably as close to a conservative as you will find on a college campus. No, that’s wrong, there are undoubtedly conservatives on college campuses. But here is a man, a tenured professor, who occupies a middle ground between the certifiable crazies like the Duke 88 or Ward Churchill and his supporters and, say Thomas Sowell, and he emotes all over the blogosphere, building enough straw men to field a small army.

I sort of like the guy. What I object to is the element of irrationality that inhabits his arguments, the emotion that colors his comments. I don’t expect much from academia. I expect less than nothing from the Liberal Arts faculty and the “studies” faculty. But somehow I expected more from the math and science faculty.

In case you have not seen this before, it's from Bill Whittle's Eject!Eject!Eject!

What Do Conservatives Care About and Why Does the MSM Not Know?

I have expanded the headline in the Powerline post because the answer to the question is obvious: the MSM does not know what Conservatives care about because they are not conservative and don’t know anyone who does. So they report from the “outside” projecting their own prejudices on to people they don’t know and don’t understand.

Conservatives, to the MSM, are analogous to those old maps of Africa with lots of blank spaces labeled “unknown”. Reading about Conservatives in the MSM is like watching your reflection in a “fun house” mirror.

Most of the mainstream coverage of last night's debate that I have seen is poor, largely because it unduly emphasizes the role played by the abortion issue. The Associated Press's account is typical. It is titled, "GOP Debate Focuses on Iraq War, Abortion," and the first seven paragraphs refer only to the participants' stances on abortion.

I think this emphasis is ludicrously out of step with the actual concerns of Republican primary voters, but very much in tune with the stereotype of Republicans that the MSM seek to convey. (It was no accident that one of Chris Matthews' questions was about Terry Schiavo!)

There are of course Republican voters who are deeply concerned about the social issues. But in my judgment, national security is far and away the biggest issue for Republican primary voters as a whole, with taxes and spending second and the social issues, of which abortion is one, third. Press coverage suggesting that last night's event focused largely on abortion give a grossly distorted view of that event and of the Republican candidates, but that is the impression that the large majority of Americans who didn't see the debate, but did see newspaper headlines, are likely to come away with.

Old Jokes My Brother Sent Me

One day a farmer's donkey fell down into a
well. The animal cried piteously for hours as
the farmer tried to figure out what to do.

Finally, he decided the animal was old, and the
well needed to be covered up anyway;
it just wasn't worth it to retrieve the donkey.

He invited all his neighbors to come over and
help him. They all grabbed a shovel and began
to shovel dirt into the well. At first, the
donkey realized what was happening and cried
horribly. Then, to everyone's amazement he
quieted down.

A few shovel loads later, the farmer finally
looked down the well. He was astonished at what
he saw. With each shovel of dirt that hit his
back, the donkey was doing something amazing.
He would shake it off and take a step up.

As the farmer's neighbors continued to shovel
dirt on top of the animal, he would shake it
off and take a step up.

Pretty soon, everyone was amazed as the donkey
stepped up over the edge of the well and
happily trotted off!

Life is going to shovel dirt on you, all kinds
of dirt. The trick to getting out of the well
is to shake it off and take a step up. Each of
our troubles is a steppingstone. We can get out
of the deepest wells just by not stopping,
never giving up! Shake it off and take a step up.

Remember the five simple rules to be happy:

Free your heart from hatred - Forgive.

Free your mind from worries - Most never happen.

Live simply and appreciate what you have.

Give more.

Expect less


NOW ............

Enough of that crap . . The donkey later came back,
and bit the farmer who had tried to bury him.
The gash from the bite got infected and
the farmer eventually died in agony from septic shock.

MORAL FROM TODAY'S LESSON:

When you do something wrong, and try to cover
your ass, it always comes back to bite you.
_____________________________________________________________________________________

On that fateful day, March 6, 1836, Davy Crockett woke up and walked from his bunk on the ground floor of the Alamo up to the observation post on the west wall.

William B.Travis and Jim Bowie were already up there.

The three gazed at the hordes of Mexicans moving steadily towards them. Davy turned to Bowie with a puzzled look on his face and said, "Jim, are we landscaping today?"

_____________________________________________________________________________________

A Soldiers Fear…

There was a black soldier who was talking to Chelsea Clinton and she asked him about fear. He said there were only three things in the world he was afraid of, Osama, Obama, and yo Mama.

_____________________________________________________________________________________

RECTUM STRETCHER

While she was "flying" down the road yesterday, a woman passed over a
bridge only to find a cop with a radar gun on the other side lying in
wait.

The cop pulled her over, walked up to the car, with that classic
patronizing smirk we all know and love, asked, "What's your hurry?"

To which she replied, "I'm late for work."

"Oh yeah," said the cop, "what do you do?"

I'm a rectum stretcher," she responded.

The cop stammered, "A what? A rectum stretcher? And just what does a
rectum stretcher do?"

"Well," she said, "I start by inserting one finger, then work my way
up
to two fingers, then three, then four, then with my whole hand in. I
work from side to side until I can get both ha nds in, and
then I slowly
but surely stretch it, until it's about 6 feet wide."

"And just what the hell do you do with a 6 foot asshole?" he asked.

"You give him a radar gun and park him behind a bridge..."

Seeing the Unseen; Part 2

Bill Whittle is back posting. Hurrah! Long read, but incredibly interesting.

Excerpts:

What I am trying to do here is to build a chain of evidence to show a progressively deteriorating epidemic of world-wide insanity, of truly diseased thinking -- not just a misunderstanding or difference of opinion but real, diagnosable mental illness. I want to get to that disease in a minute -- and the cause of it too -- but first let's examine what some people claim to believe in and the mountains of sand one has to carry in order to bury one's head so deep.

I will make the point yet again because I believe it is the crux of the issue: what kind of moral universe do you have to inhabit to be able to believe that your own people -- airline personnel, demolition experts, police and security forces, faked witnesses and all the rest -- are capable of such a thing? How much hate for your own society do you have to carry in order to live in such a desolate and ridiculous mental hell? What psychoses must a mind be riddled with in order to negate what was perfectly obvious and instead believe a theory of such monumental fantasy? How much pure constant hatred does that take? What, in short, is the miserable black hole of self-loathing that drives a person like Rosie O'Donnell and millions like her?

All of these 9/11 conspiracy sites have museum-grade idiots stating what 'obviously' happens at velocities and temperatures that they are flat-out incapable of understanding. Not only are these people too stupid to understand the physics involved with what they are bloviating about -- they are too stupid to realize that they are too stupid

How much poison can you put into your veins before you are too weak to walk? Too weak to breed? And how much more of this poison I.V. drip is needed until you die? How many of these cultural suicide pills are we going to swallow before we start to wake up to the fact that dramatists -- not the government -- are going to kill us all?

Harry Reid's Revenge

All those troops in Iraq who wrote blog posts and e-mails responding to Harry Reid's declaration of defeat are getting shut up. The Army, responding to Congressional Democrats complaints have:

...ordered soldiers to stop posting to blogs or sending personal e-mail messages, without first clearing the content with a superior officer, Wired News has learned. The directive, issued April 19, is the sharpest restriction on troops' online activities since the start of the Iraq war. And it could mean the end of military blogs, observers say.

Now that's the way the Democrats like it. Disagree with us? We'll tell you to shut up and you will salute sharply and obey. It works in the Army, it works in the academic world and it works in the MSM. All that's left is talk radio and, never fear, they have the "fairness doctrine" to resurrect from the gave to shut down anyone who disagrees.

More HERE and HERE

After Imus: End the Executions

From the Wall Street Journal editorial page:

Don Imus, Bernard McGuirk, Trent Lott, Larry Summers, the Duke lacrosse team, Jimmy the Greek, the kid who yelled "water buffalo" at Penn, Howard Cosell, Jon Stewart, Chief Illiniwek, Jackie Mason and "South Park" all have in common only one thing: They have not been Politically Correct.

Some were brought down by it, and some have made a living from it. Today, there are people who even say that the satire on shows such as "South Park" or the "Daily Show" have made political correctness a harmless amusement. We have become so cool that we can simultaneously abide PC's merciless strictures against saying the wrong things about the right people even as we laugh at our subjugation to PC.

Despite the ironic mockery, political correctness still packs a punch. Say the wrong thing today and you can be gone tomorrow, your status as a top broadcaster, university president or politician obliterated. It happens in the small space of a sentence -- defrocked, banished, gonzo. Outside a courtroom, I'm not aware of many other forces in American life that can do that.

Don Imus thought he had banked enough social capital to call black women "hos" for a laugh. Weirdly unplugged from the two-second tape delay in the back of his brain ("Don't do it"), he blurted something only black hip-hop singers get to say about black women.

In what for our time is the equivalent of burning witches, the broadcasting careers of Mr. Imus and of his producer Bernard McGuirk were then put to the torch. It took them about a week to die, but with Al Sharpton stoking the flames and the parsons of the press pouring on gasoline, they finally expired, allowing most of us to disperse back to jobs and careers whose abrupt termination generally requires a statutory felony rather than merely hurting someone's feelings.

Then last week the Imus incineration took an abrupt and unexpected turn: Russell Simmons, a famous hip-hop music promoter whose stature in recent years has swelled to cultural wise man, announced to the hip-hop "community" that it was time to retire the "h", "b" and "n" words. For the eight or nine Journal readers who don't listen to the rhymes of hip-hop, "b" rhymes with witch, and "n" rhymes with bigger.

Few would disagree that it would be a good thing if Don Imus became the last man in public to call a black woman a "ho." Few in the civilized world would miss hearing rappers rhyme women with "witch" and "bigger." And as a result, some would say, see, political correctness really does have its uses. It bans what nearly anyone would consider hateful, tasteless, insulting, abusive, disgusting language.

Right. That used to be known as good taste before the left delivered PC into the world. Over the years, political correctness has seemed to wax and wane, without ever disappearing. It was a relief when it offered a few laughs. What has never gone away, though, is the fact that ultimately political correctness is toxic.

Exhibit A is the Duke lacrosse team. Exhibit B is the annihilation of Harvard President Larry Summers. All the other exhibits are the forgotten professors, DJs and commentators whose jobs ended with a wrong phrase.

Duke was a particularly virulent strain of PC. It was breathtaking how fast the Duke incident broke into a politically correct scenario: privileged, women-baiting white males humiliate and assault a disadvantaged black female. Once rooted in the press, this "narrative" crushed the lives of the accused students, ruined the career of the team's coach and almost trumped the criminal justice system. For a falsity, that's pretty potent.

At a scholarly meeting two years ago, then-Harvard President Larry Summers suggested that women are underrepresented at the top of science and engineering because of what he described as the evidently more men than women who are "three and a half, four standard deviations above the mean." I recall back then reading the transcript of Mr. Summer's remarks, which is filled with caveats, obeisances, impenetrable prose and tangled logic. From this morass, it was possible to extract a big PC faux pas. But to think Mr. Summers was led from this turgid speech to the pyre, where his entire career as president of Harvard was immolated is, well, striking.

This is the way we live now: The only place where speech can occur without fear of job loss is on a cartoon show or in stand-up comedy. This means only the self-identified nuts can say what they want. Welcome to the asylum.

The left doesn't mind if comedians savage PC. So what? You get to laugh at the cartoon version but they use the real stuff to fire and eliminate whomever they wish. Thus do we all become their sheep.

Most people subscribe to the soft form of PC, which holds that the world will be a better place when we all have a little more equitable love in our hearts. Fine. But the hard form, played out at Duke and Harvard, is not about evening the odds; it's about exercising power, about reversing the odds. Thus, when a Larry Summers or Trent Lott trips up, the velvet glove of niceness comes off and the enemy is annihilated, abetted by a First Amendment media OK with executions for wrongful speech.

The result is that people sympathetic to PC's nominal goals are taken aback at its virulent results. Kind of like hip-hop. So in the spirit of Russell Simmons's overdue H-B-N ban, a proposed PC truce: Short of prosecutable acts, violations of PC should not lead to loss of livelihood. No more summary executions. No more firings. No more allowing the Al Sharptons to decide who makes a living and who doesn't. Don Imus is financially set, but not so the average college prof or schmo sports commentator. With this no-job-loss rule in place, Mr. Summers's enemies would have had to overthrow him on the merits of his presidency, not PC.

This won't solve all the depredations of political correctness, or its penchant for imposing lifelong stigma on offenders. But it would stop the zombies who serve as administrators, executives and advertisers from being instruments of career destruction. Sanctions or suspensions can be meted on a case-specific basis. "Nappy-headed hos" deserved at least a pistol-whipping.

Imus is hardly a casualty to mourn, but Duke was a PC travesty, which we shouldn't allow to slip down the memory hole. So was the Summers case. It's long past time to make political correctness politically correct.

(The new section is PC crap).

Chutzpah definition: Episcopal Church, Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori,

The head of the Episcopal Church, Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori, is complaining about Nigerian Anglican bishops coming to Virginia this weekend to formally install the head of the conservative breakaway denomination in this country. Here's what she said: "Such action would violate the ancient customs of the church."

I kid you not. The female head of a church with a practicing homosexual bishop planning to "marry" his lover, a church that could accept into seminary the adulterous homosexual governor of New Jersey, a church that embraces splitting open babies' skulls and vacuuming their brains out, is complaining about violating ancient customs? Wow.

Here's what Mark Steyn said:

Mark, what's interesting about the Episcopal breakaway faction in the US is the indestructible assumption of the Presiding Bishop and her colleagues that they are the mainstream and the inevitable progressive future, and that the Nigerian bishops are the fringe and the doomed reactionary past. On any Sunday morning, there are more Anglicans in the pews in Nigeria than in the United Kingdom, the United States and Canada combined. So much for head office.
If the Anglican Communion has a future, it won't be thanks to Bishop Katharine Jefforts Schori and the predictably reductive preoccupations of her ministry.

Oxford’s Preposterous Proposition

Jonah Goldberg defends America.

Last week, I appeared at the Oxford Union to debate the proposition: “This House regrets the founding of The United States of America.” Such is the extent of anti-Americanism out there that this was considered to be a reasonable debate topic by Britain’s best and brightest.

It was an exhilarating and daunting experience. I do a lot of campus speaking and yet, going in, this felt like the functional equivalent of Rose Bowl. Ultimately, it turned out otherwise. But I only really realized that in retrospect.

Read the rest, it's quite entertaining.

NO WONDER THEY'RE AFRAID OF BRIT HUME

Ann Coulter on the Democrats debate:

I just woke up from watching the Democrats' debate last Thursday, and I am rested and ready to report!

Someone needs to tell the Democrats to stop talking about their families. I know they're trying to demonstrate their "family values," but using actual, live human beings to illustrate the freakish ideas of the Democratic base just makes normal people uncomfortable.

When Chris Dodd was asked about gay marriage, he said he always thinks of his little daughters — aged 2 and 5 — and imagines them turning out to be lesbians, saying he would want them treated equally.

To prove his bona fides to the environmentalist nuts, Obama said: "We've also been working to install lightbulbs that last longer and save energy. And that's something that I'm trying to teach my daughters, 8-year-old Malia and 5-year-old Sasha."

So we finally have an answer to the question: What do Democrats teach their daughters? Is it:

(a) integrity
(b) character
(c) the importance of always telling the truth

No! The answer is: (d) They teach their daughters to use low-energy lightbulbs. This is so important that it apparently bears mentioning during a debate under high-intensity TV studio lights.

(How many kids does it take to screw in a lightbulb? In the Barack household, evidently, it takes two.)

"Best in Show" for cringe-inducing mentions of family members went to John Edwards. In the single most appalling moment of the debate, John Edwards reminisced about the time his father, who was sitting in the audience, totally humiliated him as a child.

"I can remember vividly my dad after church once Sunday, when I was about 10 years old, taking us — it's our whole family — into a restaurant. I was dressed up. I was very proud to be there, and we sat, got our menus, looked at the menus, and the waitress came over and my father said, 'I'm sorry. We have to leave.' I didn't understand. 'Why? Why do we have to leave?' And I was embarrassed. I found out when we got outside the reason we had to leave is he couldn't pay the prices that were on the menu."

Thanks for the memories, Pop!

The not-visibly-insane Democrats all claim they'll get rough with the terrorists, but they can't even face Brit Hume.

In case you missed this profile in Democrat machismo, the Democratic presidential candidates are refusing to participate in a debate hosted by Fox News Channel because the hosts are "biased." But they'll face down Mahmoud Ahmadinejad!

At this, even Hillary Clinton was thinking, "Come on, guys — let's grow a pair."

Obama was asked to name "America's three most important allies around the world" — a question rejected as "too easy" on Fox's new game show "Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?" Any politically savvy 11-year-old could have named Britain, Australia and Israel.

B. Hussein Obama answered: "the European Union." Which is (a) not a country, and (b) not an ally.

What was his next guess? Epcot Center?

In addition to not being a country, the "European Union" happens to be composed of people who hate our guts. It is the continent where Moveon.org-style lunatics are the friendly, pro-American types and the rest are crazy Muslims.

Obama did eventually mention Japan as an ally — along with China and Afghanistan — which would have been a better answer to the question: "Who are America's four or five most important allies?" But at least he named a country that could conceivably be called "an ally."

Of course, it took Obama less time to remember an American ally than it took John Edwards to remember Jesus. Edwards was asked who his "moral leader" was — and he was stuck for an answer.

I had time to shout "Jesus" at the TV 20 times, exhaust myself, and have a sandwich before Edwards finally coughed up "mah lowrd." Even then it appeared that Edwards was not actually naming the Savior but exclaiming, "Mah lowrd, that's a tough question!"

Edwards then put "mah lowrd" (assuming that was his answer) on a par with other moral leaders such as his father — who had embarrassed him so as a child — and his wife. (When he mentioned his spouse as a "moral leader," Hillary visibly tensed for fear that she might be asked the same question.)

In fairness to Edwards, asking a trial lawyer to name his favorite moral leader is like asking the president of Iran to name his favorite Jew. (Answer: George Soros.)

If you're keeping score, that's two major religions the Democrats lack a working knowledge of — Christianity and Islam.

Faculty Hiring Priorities at Colgate University:

From the Volokh Conspiracy:

Which is more important — that a department have all of its disciplinary subfields represented or that it diversify its faculty? That’s the question being posed at Colgate University in an attempt to change how hiring committees have considered questions of diversity — and posing the question may be having an impact.

Lyle Roelofs, dean of the faculty, has been asking the question. Roelofs said that individual departments make the hiring decisions — “departments know how to judge quality” — but that as part of broad discussions about diversity at the university, he has tried to suggest some new ideas. Traditionally, he said that there has been a broad consensus (even if no formal policy exists) that the top factor to consider in a faculty hire is excellence in teaching and research, followed by match of candidates with the subfield specialties needed, then followed by diversity concerns.

After a series of efforts, Colgate has seen the percentage of minority faculty members rise to about 20 percent, with the percentage of women topping 40 percent. But as a small liberal arts university in a rural setting, Colgate has a hard time holding on to minority professors — and so needs to keep hiring them as well as trying to encourage more of them to make their careers at the university. Roelofs has asked departments to flop the second and third criteria. Excellence will stay on top, but diversity would generally trump subfield choice.

“There are going to be appropriate gains for us if we can be more diverse,” Roelofs said. “When you have a more diverse faculty, there emerges a greater diversity in curriculum. Greater value is placed on difference. So why not think about each hire and say, ‘in this situation are we better off thinking about how we need someone on 18th century reflection of Shakespeare, or have a broad description to maximize our opportunities on diversity?’ “

Another bastion of Liberalism decides that they would rather judge on the color of my skin rather than the content of my character.

"Kill All Americans"

Via Belmont Club:

The Hamas spokesperson concluded with a prayer, saying: "Oh Allah, vanquish the Jews and their supporters. Oh Allah, count their numbers, and kill them all, down to the very last one. Oh Allah, show them a day of darkness. Oh Allah, who sent down His Book, the mover of the clouds, who defeated the enemies of the Prophet defeat the Jews and the Americans, and bring us victory over them."

To the very last one? Does that include everyone? Boy, better tell Harry Reid. If this is the face of the enemy then it is not confined to Iraq. It is also elsewhere and we had better have a strategy for dealing with it after withdrawing from Iraq. This guy Ahmad Bahr is one our partners in the peace process in Palestine. And he's delivering this sermon in the Sudan. In a mosque yet. The Sudan, not Iraq -- you know the country in Africa with these problems in Darfur which the UN is going to fix?

As I said HERE, leaving Iraq is not the answer. They have killed us here and will follow us here.

Another Grunt’s Rant on Iraq

The Democrats in Congress consigned several million little brown people to their deaths when they refused air support to the Vietnamese after the North attacked. They never paid a price.

Having done it once, it's easier to do it a second time. After all, how many times can you lose your virtue?

Here's one soldier's take:

Whether you like our being in Iraq or not, it’s clear that most of the people want “out.” After all, who would ever want to fight a war? But if push comes to shove, would Congress stop supporting the troops, or vote to cut off the funding necessary to continue the mission, or vote to surrender over there? I doubt it.

But that’s what the Democrats are trying to do.

They’re trying to pull the plug on our efforts, not by voting to end the war, or expressly cutting off any spending for it, but by suggesting that funding be tied to a specific timetable for withdrawal.

And that, in my mind, is surrender. As soon as you tell the enemy that you are going to leave, all they have to do is sit back and wait for you to leave. And, if they really hate you, they can start sniping at you as you go, when you’re most vulnerable to an attack. A retrograde maneuver is one of the most difficult tactical missions an army is ever faced with. A retreat, and that’s what this would be, requires stealth, continual pressure on the forces opposing yours, and lots of political spin.

What the Democrats are doing is akin to what we did in Vietnam by signing a peace agreement with the North Vietnamese, tantamount to bailing out on our allies’ without their concurrence, then departing with absolutely no intention of ever coming back, no matter what the North Vietnamese did. Congress also cut off financial support for South Vietnam after our departure. And sure as hell, as soon as we left, the North Vietnamese attacked south in full force, and for two more years, the two sides pounded each other until the more determined North, supported by Russia and China, won the war. And we veterans here at home who had fought and seen so many of our buddies die over there, had to keep our mouths shut and just take it.

And we felt the shame of defeat. Not a defeat we’d suffered, but a defeat of our national will. And that enraged me and made me feel ashamed. It took me more than forty years to get over it, and I still simmer when I think about it.

And we’re going to do it again, thanks to the Democrats in Congress.

There is one difference between Viet Nam and Iraq. North Viet Nam never attacked us first and never wanted to follow us home. This time it's different. This time they attacked us first and if we leave they will follow us home. And this time the Democrats will pay, in blood.

Black female entitlement

Jeff Goldstein asks a provocative question:

Question: what would happen were an academic to take the actual findings of new AG Cooper’s follow-up report on the Duke “Rape” case and write a dissertation based on those findings?

Or, to put it more provocatively: would a dissertation that posited “black, female entitlement”—based, as it is, on a culture of victim politics that rewards group-based grievance narratives and puts the burden of proving a negative on the accused in instances where allegations of sexual offenses against women are proffered—as a society-wide problem, one that underscores the pernicious nature of identity politics and so demands redress through a policy of consciously rolling back weighted legislation benefiting “protected classes,” be so readily accepted by media and intellectual “elites”?

And if not, why not?—it being merely the flipside of the kinds of sociological assertions establishment feminists and the faculty 88 championed (and continue to champion, in many cases) before all the facts of the case came to light?

My guess? They’d call such a dissertation “racist” and “misogynistic”—and move to have its writer expelled from the university. Which just goes to show the growing inability of many academics and establishment feminists (and their “progressive” supporters and enablers) to recognize the inconsistency of their views, and to honestly face their own biases and stereotypes.

A Loser's History: George Tenet's sniveling, self-justifying new book is a disgrace.

Christopher Hitchens pulls no punches:

[T]he only really interesting question is why the president did not fire this vain and useless person on the very first day of the war. Instead, he awarded him a Presidential Medal of Freedom! Tenet is now so self-pitying that he expects us to believe that he was "not at all sure that [he] really wanted to accept" this honor. But it seems that he allowed or persuaded himself to do so, given that the citation didn't mention Iraq. You could imagine that Tenet had never sat directly behind Colin Powell at the United Nations, beaming like an overfed cat, as the secretary of state went through his rather ill-starred presentation. And who cares whether his "slam dunk" vulgarity was misquoted or not? We have better evidence than that. Here is what Tenet told the relevant Senate committee in February 2002...

[snip]

In this case, a bogus history is being offered by a real loser whose hindsight is cockeyed and who had no foresight at all.

I have read no one who thinks well of Tenet's tome.

Don't Know Much About History...

What Liberal media?

By COLLEEN LONG
The Associated Press

NEW YORK (AP) — For the first time in history, a woman has the visibility, the reputation and the cash to make a serious run at the presidency. [...]

I only scanned the rest of the article, which was, as I suspected, as fatuous as the first sentence, but aside from that, it was interesting there was no mention anywhere of Elizabeth Dole, a wealthy, reputable, not invisible woman who ran, seriously, for the Presidency in 2000. Of course, since she was a Republican, she apparently doesn't count.

Boehner v. McDermott

McDermott is now on the hook for $700,000.

Here's more.

Lawyers for 18 news organizations - including major television networks, The Associated Press, The New York Times and The Washington Post - filed a brief backing McDermott last year. They said a ruling against him could hurt the media's ability to gather information on important public issues.

Putting terrorists under stress and waterboarding is torture, according to the Media Lords, but illegally taping private phone calls and printing them to embarrass your political opponents is an importatn media right and "hurts the media's ability to gather information on important public issues."

Yeah, sure.

Earth's Climate Is Seesawing, According To Climate Researchers

You mean the climate varies? Get me Al Gore...

Do Only Republicans Have Sex?

Eitor & Publisher heads the story with the headline:

Washington Editors: Reluctant to Publish 'D.C. Madam' Client List

Down a few paragraphs we are told that:

Since then, ABC has reported that the list includes "customers who could be potential witnesses" such as "a Bush administration economist, the head of a conservative think tank, a prominent CEO, several lobbyists and a handful of military officials." The network plans a lengthy report on the story Friday on 20/20, with hints that more names might be revealed.

Which leads to the question: are Republicans more sexually active or do Democrats get sex for free?

NBC cameraman flies Mexican flag at march

You mean that biased media?

Mara Liasson and Illegal Immigrants: Can't Understand Why an Amnesty Bill Has Not Passed.

Tonight on Fox’s Special Report with Brit Hume the panel discussed illegal immigrants. This was the way that thousands demonstrated for open borders, amnesty and the legalization of illegals.

Mara Liasson – of NPR and PBS - wondered aloud why a bill mandating their demands – or at least providing amnesty – had not already passed. She cited the fact that leaders of both parties are in favor of allowing illegals to stay and providing them an easy path to citizenship. So what’s the holdup?

Well, it seems the “people” are opposed. That leads to the question of the disconnect between the leaders and the people.

Many reasons are given and there is some truth, I am sure, in all of them. But there is one overwhelming difference between the “leaders” and the people: to America’s leaders Mexican immigrants are the household help: the maids and gardeners who provide the menial labor; analogous to the servants in English homes prior to the 20th century.

To the rest of America, immigrants are the competition; the people who will work for below-minimum wages. They are the people they encounter when they shop at Wal-Mart who can’t speak English and who are the reason for the bi-lingual signs in the big-box stores. They are the ones who are changing the country and competing for jobs, who are eating their tax dollars, and who they can’t afford to hire to do menial jobs because they don’t have the disposable income.

And Mara Liasson doesn’t relate because she is not one of them, never was and never will be.

Homeowners Rebellion

The Wall Street Journal has an editorial that is particularly telling in the Tidewater area. Property taxes have been rising by double digit rates annually for the past four years and the cities have managed to spend every penny…and more.

The local politicians have looked at this gusher and decided that this is the time to fund every dream they ever had, to give generous pay raises to every municipal employee, and to hire more.

But the cash rolling into municipal coffers is not generated spontaneously. They are not “pennies from heaven.” The money comes out of the pockets of people whose income is not rising at double digit rates, a large number of whom live on fixed income in homes that they bought 40 to 50 years ago for a small fraction of their current assessment. These people are being literally forced out of homes that they may “own” but whose taxes they cannot afford.

One interesting sidelight: the Virginian Pilot, the dominant local newspaper, a reliable advocate for increased taxes whenever the opportunity presents itself (and it does almost daily), has the habit of reporting the rate of tax increases as a percentage, but the proposals to reduce property taxes in pennies.

As an example:

Chesapeake residents have faced the same tax woes that have upset
homeowners across Hampton Roads. In 2006, property values in Chesapeake rose an average of 28 percent. This year, they jumped 10.2 percent.

Other localities have considered tax relief to combat growing property
assessments. The Portsmouth City Council cut its rate by 10 cents last week.
Norfolk's city manager wants to do the same thing. And Virginia Beach's city
manager proposed a 6-cent reduction earlier this month.
The Chesapeake City Council responded last year with a 12-cent rate cut. But Chesapeake acting City Manager Anne Odell advised the council in March to keep its current rate of $1.09 per $100 of assessed value. Residents also pay an additional 2 cents per $100 of assessed value for mosquito control. Budget officials said the city will need the cash as the real estate market settles and revenues flatten.

The one thing you can’t determine from this article is how the assessment increases compare to the rate cuts. If property values increase by 28% followed by 10.2%, what is the net effect of a 12 cent reduction? Are the editors of the Virginian Pilot totally mathematically illiterate, or is this a way of keeping the readers in the dark about the tax increases they are paying?

Honest reporting would go something like this: Chesapeake assessments rose 28% in 2006. Property tax rates were reduced by about 10%. The typical Chesapeake homeowner paid 18% more last year in property taxes.

That’s homes; but it’s not part of the way the Pilot reports.

Now the Journal editorial (in full):

The great American tax revolt is brewing again, not inside the Washington Beltway but in cities across the country. Minnesota, Michigan, New Jersey, Connecticut, Arizona, Virginia, Florida -- all have voters trembling with agitation against high and rising levels of taxation.

Last month antitax activists in Minnesota staged a tax protest that drew some 6,000 taxpayers to the steps of the Capitol Dome in what is considered to be the highest turnout for a political rally in years. The crowd was three times larger than the turnout for the hyped MoveOn.org global warming march in Minneapolis. Three days later, hundreds of taxpayers in Lansing, Michigan, swarmed the capital steps to protest Governor Jennifer Granholm's call for higher taxes on business, gas, cigarettes and alcohol. "Not Another Penny, Jenny," one sign read.

In normally placid Princeton, New Jersey, voters recently rejected a tax levy for schools for the first time in 16 years. For homes valued at $400,000 -- which aren't the domiciles of the rich -- property taxes have skyrocketed to nearly $14,000.

Ground zero for the tax rebellion is undoubtedly Florida. On April 17 hundreds of taxpayer activists, homeowners, real-estate agents and homebuilders marched on Tallahassee chanting "Cut Taxes Now." Here, too, the issue is property-tax assessments. Florida's property-tax collections rose 50% statewide between 2003 and 2006, a windfall from the red-hot housing market.

Thanks to the resulting revenue gusher, local government spending doubled between 2000 and 2006. But now property owners are facing a double whammy: falling housing values and rising property taxes. "Floridians today are crying out for property-tax relief," says Donna Arduin, the former state budget director and an architect of one of the tax cap proposals.

Florida's experience with sagging housing markets and state spending is hardly unique. In Lake Tahoe, California, property taxes rose 135% in four years. In Arizona taxpayer groups are gathering signatures for a mandatory property-tax rollback voter initiative to be placed on the November 2008 ballot.

In Northern Virginia, boom times in real estate coincided with double-digit percentage increases in the county budgets of Arlington and Fairfax every year from 2003 through 2006, even as tax rates were cut slightly. Loudoun County's budget has tripled since 2000. But with this year's U-turn in home values, these Virginia counties have proposed tax-rate increases of 3% to 5% to sustain their spending.

Nationwide, home values crept up by barely 1% last year, but property-tax collections rose by 7%. The spread can be expected to continue to widen; home sales fell by 8% in March, the largest decline in 18 years.

Even Connecticut has noticed. Republican Governor M. Jodi Rell, who is trying to raise income taxes and has been rated as one of the Governors least friendly to taxpayers, recently warned the Legislature "there is going to be a property-tax revolt in this state if real action is not taken." She's seeking a 3% per year cap on annual increases, this for a state that ranks third highest in per-capita property taxes.

A new report from the Tax Foundation finds that while federal taxes have moderated, state and local taxes are now at an all-time high as a share of income. Florida could be the next state to act. The Legislature's current session has been dominated by debate over how to cap or reduce property taxes, and every politician in sight seems to have a plan. One proposal would roll back property taxes an enormous $6 billion and cut assessments as much as 40% in cities such as Miami where spending is out of control.

As usual, mayors, education lobbyists, public employee unions and social service providers are threatening chaos in city services. These were the same fears invoked when California commenced the modern-day tax revolt in 1978 with Proposition 13. But property taxes were cut by 30%, and California went on a 12-year growth spurt nearly unprecedented in U.S. history. The spirit of Prop. 13 may be coming soon to a county near you.

U.S. taxpayers subsidize terrorist propaganda and Holocaust denial in the Arab world.

From the Opinion Journal:

Testifying under oath recently, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice misled Congress in her strong defense of Al-Hurra, the taxpayer financed Arab TV network. It was unwitting, though. She herself was misled.

During the March 21 House Foreign Operations Appropriations subcommittee hearing, Rep. Mark Kirk (R., Ill.) pressed Ms. Rice on the wisdom of providing a platform to Islamic terrorists, citing Hezbollah leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah's Dec. 7 speech, which Al-Hurra aired live. The broadcast speech "went on for 30 minutes," she responded, "followed by commentary, much of which was critical of Nasrallah."

In fact, Mr. Nasrallah's speech was carried in its entirety, roughly an hour and eight minutes. The commentary that followed--a 13-minute phone interview with Wael Abou Faour, a member of Lebanon's governing coalition--was indeed critical of Mr. Nasrallah. He accused the Hezbollah leader of not being anti-U.S. and anti-Israel enough. While Mr. Nasrallah had claimed Lebanon's governing coalition was aligned with the U.S. and had backed Israel during the war last summer, Mr. Abou Faour said that Hezbollah was actually closer to the U.S and added that any Lebanese faction that assisted "the Israeli enemy" should not be allowed to engage in political discussion because "the only place they should be [is] in prison."

The secretary of state's testimony was without doubt delivered in good faith. But the same cannot be said of the information about the broadcast Al-Hurra provided to the State Department.

It is criminal that the US taxpayer's money is being used to broadcast Islamofacist propaganda.

Brokaw Wonders Why Tenet Didn't Resign Given 'Rogue' Pentagon Operation

Newsbusters:

The Bush administration: a bigger threat to national security than a foreign spy. That was Tom Brokaw's implicit assumption in his interview with former CIA Director George Tenet on this morning's "Today." Along the way, Brokaw accused former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld of running a "rogue" intelligence operation.

[transcript of interview]

Brokaw never explained how an intelligence operation created by a Secretary of Defense who was appointed by the president, and which operation in turn reported to the president, could be considered "rogue." And while Tenet oh-so-delicately declined to necessarily agree with all of Brokaw's accusations, he pointedly did not take issue with Brokaw's stunning "rogue" allegation.

Note also Brokaw's claim that "the country was not getting the true story." The former Nightly News anchor seems to align himself with the "Bush lied, people died" crowd.
Meanwhile, what ever happened to the stiff upper lip?

Dinosaur Watch: Newspaper Decline Continues

The Dinosaur media continues to lose readers:

Blame the big metro papers -- again. The Audit Bureau of Circulations released the spring numbers this morning, revealing more plunges in daily and Sunday circulation.

As in the past, the losses are steep while gains are minimal. This is the fifth consecutive reporting period that overall newspaper circulation experienced big drops, despite easing comparisons. For all papers reporting daily circulation, the number is estimated to have fallen 2.5%, while Sunday is forecasted to have tumbled 3%.

The Truth About the Pay Gap: Feminist politics and bad economics

From Reason Magazine:

Even before they have kids, men and women often do different things that may affect earnings. A year out of college, notes AAUW, women in full-time jobs work an average of 42 hours a week, compared to 45 for men. Men are also far more likely to work more than 50 hours a week.

Buried in the report is a startling admission: "After accounting for all factors known to affect wages, about one-quarter of the gap remains unexplained and may be attributed to discrimination" (my emphasis). Another way to put it is that three-quarters of the gap clearly has innocent causes -- and that we actually don't know whether discrimination accounts for the rest.

I asked Harvard economist Claudia Goldin if there is sufficient evidence to conclude that women experience systematic pay discrimination. "No," she replied. There are certainly instances of discrimination, she says, but most of the gap is the result of different choices. Other hard-to-measure factors, Goldin thinks, largely account for the remaining gap -- "probably not all, but most of it."

The divergent career paths of men and women may reflect a basic unfairness in what's expected of them. It could be that a lot of mothers, if they had their way, would rather pursue careers but have to stay home with the kids because their husbands insist. Or it may be that for one reason or another, many mothers prefer to take on the lion's share of child-rearing. In any case, the pay disparity caused by these choices can't be blamed on piggish employers.

June O'Neill, an economist at Baruch College and former director of the Congressional Budget Office, has uncovered something that debunks the discrimination thesis. Take out the effects of marriage and child-rearing, and the difference between the genders suddenly vanishes. "For men and women who never marry and never have children, there is no earnings gap," she said in an interview.

That's a fact you won't hear from AAUW or the Democratic presidential candidates. The prevailing impulse on Equal Pay Day was to lament how far we are from the goal. The true revelation, though, is how close.

Climate change hits Mars

From the TimesOnLine:

Mars is being hit by rapid climate change and it is happening so fast that the red planet could lose its southern ice cap, writes Jonathan Leake.

Scientists from Nasa say that Mars has warmed by about 0.5C since the 1970s. This is similar to the warming experienced on Earth over approximately the same period.

I wonder why?

New Idea for the Obese: Fat Offsets

Never let it be said the American ingenuity has ended. The carbon offset industry is only the beginning of a new trend in indulgence. Now you can roam the earth in your private Gulfstream jet without guilt, luxuriate in your mansion using twenty times the energy of your average home. But what about the obese?

Obesity is rampant. Over 20% of Americans 30 to 69 are obese. And, as usual, women and minorities are hardest hit. Can the same ingenuity that allows Al Gore and John Edwards reduce their carbon footprint be used to reduce the fat footprint of the obese/ In other words, can we buy fat offsets?

Well, why not? How many times have we seen pictures of emaciated children in other parts of the world? No matter how much we give, there never seems to be a shortage of starvation.

Let’s build on the lessons taught us by Liberals saving the planet. Let’s adopt a starving African or Asian and pay him or her to continue to starve!

I, for one want to get ahead of the curve before Al Gore beats me to the punch and corners the market on starvation. We can begin here.

Tell me how much you want to lose and I’ll match you up with the right offset. Limit, one starving Ethiopian per customer.

Picture of sample:

What Dots? What Connecting?

So al-Hadi, a former Iraqi soldier who became a top al Qaeda operative in Afghanistan and later supervised that organization's operations in Iraq was caught re-entering that country from Iran: three entities that, we are told, cannot possibly have anything to do with one another.

Is That a Gun in Your Pocket? or The disarming of America

The Toledo Blade says Dan Simpson is a retired diplomat and a member of the editorial board of the paper. People are wondering if he is writing a parody. Google Dan Simpson and you'll find that this article is serious.

Lest anyone think he's afraid of guns, he lets you in on his "experience."

And before anyone starts to hyperventilate and think I'm a crazed liberal zealot wanting to take his gun from his cold, dead hands, let me share my experience of guns.

As a child I played cowboys and Indians with cap guns. I had a Daisy Red Ryder B-B gun. My father had in his bedside table drawer an old pistol which I examined surreptitiously from time to time. When assigned to the American embassy in Beirut during the war in Lebanon, I sometimes carried a .357 Magnum, which I could fire accurately. I also learned to handle and fire a variety of weapons while I was there, including Uzis and rocket-propelled grenade launchers.

He neglects to mention the time he blew away a small European country with a nuclear missile.
He starts with:

Now, how would one disarm the American population? First of all, federal or state laws would need to make it a crime punishable by a $1,000 fine and one year in prison per weapon to possess a firearm. The population would then be given three months to turn in their guns, without penalty.

After that he gets serious. You have to read it to believe it.

For a parody you can't get better than Iowahawk.

LAST week's tragedy at Virginia Tech in which a mentally disturbed person gunned down 32 of America's finest - intelligent young people with futures ahead of them - once again puts the phenomenon of an armed society into focus for Americans.

Let's do the math: (a) those two Virgina Tech guns killed an average of 16.5 people; (2) by conservative estimates, 240 million guns are wandering aimlessly around America's mean streets; therefore (iii) when these crazy guns finally snap, they will kill (16.5 x 240 million) = 4 billion people -- wiping out not only Virginia Tech, but the entire ACC and NCAA Division I-A itself. In this post-gun apocalypse there won't be enough survivors to bury the dead, let alone fill a decent bracket at the NCAA basketball tournament.

Obviously something must be done to stop this impending March Madness. But when people talk about doing something about guns in America, it often comes down to this: "How could America disarm even if it wanted to? There are so many guns out there."

To this smart-alecky question, a sane person would retort, "what difference does it make what America wants to do?" But, because I have little or no power to influence the "if" part of the issue, I will stick with the "how," and later I will move on to the "even." And before anyone starts to hyperventilate and think I'm some wacky crazed liberal zealot wanting to pry his precious gun from his cold, dead hands, I would first like to share my experience of guns, before outlining my commonsense plan for taking your guns.

As a child I played cowboys and Indians with cap guns. By the time I was 8 I had over 500 confirmed Injun kills notched in the stock of my Daisy Red Ryder, including Chuckie "Big Chief Running Bear" Petersen, despite his stubborn 54-year refusal to acknowledge, to this day, that I picked 'em off at the swing set, Tom Mix-style. My father had in his bedside table drawer an old pistol which I examined surreptitiously from time to time. In this same drawer, my father also kept his collection of Stag magazines, which I also enjoyed examining. It was in that magical bedside drawer I discovered my two lifelong loves: searching for guns, and masturbation.

Read both articles. The one is funny, the other is also funny in a scary way.

UPDATE: The lunatic means this stuff from Ace of Spades:

No Punking: Slublog has produced a welter of cites in the comments (just skim for the red text, morons) proving conclusively this guy is a dyed-in-the-organic-wool moonbat of the highest order. There is no Swiftian Modest Proposal thing going on here.

This lunatic means this stuff.

He would do everything possible to avoid an armed confrontation with a foreign enemy sworn to war against us.

But he's just itching to kill whole swaths of his more... problematic fellow American citizens.

Jimmy Carter Was Bought; Dershowitz on Arab Oil Money

The war with Islamofascism has made strange bedfellows. Alan M. Dershowitz is a very Liberal Harvard law professor. But he is also Jewish, and realizes that in this war if the West goes down, the Jews will go down first. America may be the “Great Satan” but Jews are “pigs and dogs” that need to be eradicated.

He understands that people often mean what they say. He knows that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is a person who can hold two contradictory ideas in his head simultaneously: he denies the Holocaust while regretting that Hitler did not finish the job. He knows that Hitler told the world about his plans to eradicate the Jews years before he had the power to put his solution into effect. The Islamofascists are being equally open about their desires.

For that reason, he and the Right are on the same page regarding the war, or at least the need for the war.

He supported Jimmy Carter before anyone outside of Georgia had ever heard of him. In this article he tells us their history. He then lists the way the Jimmy has been bought and paid for by Arab oil money. Some has come from a foundation begun by

“…a Shiekh and run by his son, hosted speakers who called Jews "the enemies of all nations," attributed the assassination of John Kennedy to Israel and the Mossad and the 9/11 attacks to the United States' own military, and stated that the Holocaust was a "fable."”

Click on the link for the whole article. He concludes:

No reasonable person can dispute therefore that Jimmy Carter has been and remains dependent on Arab oil money, particularly from Saudi Arabia. Does this mean that Carter has necessarily been influenced in his thinking about the Middle East by receipt of such enormous amounts of money? Ask Carter.

The entire premise of his criticism of Jewish influence on American foreign policy is that money talks. It is Carter, not me, who has made the point that if politicians receive money from Jewish sources, then they are not free to decide issues regarding the Middle East for themselves. It is Carter, not me, who has argued that distinguished reporters cannot honestly report on the Middle East because they are being paid by Jewish money. So, by Carter's own standards, it would be almost economically "suicidal" for Carter "to espouse a balanced position between Israel and Palestine."

By Carter's own standards, therefore, his views on the Middle East must be discounted. It is certainly possible that he now believes them. Money, particularly large amounts of money, has a way of persuading people to a particular position. It would not surprise me if Carter, having received so much Arab money, is now honestly committed to their cause. But his failure to disclose the extent of his financial dependence on Arab money, and the absence of any self reflection on whether the receipt of this money has unduly influenced his views, is a form of deception bordering on corruption.

I have met cigarette lobbyists, who are supported by the cigarette industry, and who have come to believe honestly that cigarettes are merely a safe form of adult recreation, that cigarettes are not addicting and that the cigarette industry is really trying to persuade children not to smoke. These people are fooling themselves (or fooling us into believing that they are fooling themselves) just as Jimmy Carter is fooling himself (or persuading us to believe that he is fooling himself).

If money determines political and public views as Carter insists "Jewish money" does, Carter's views on the Middle East must be deemed to have been influenced by the vast sums of Arab money he has received. If he who pays the piper calls the tune, then Carter's off-key tunes have been called by his Saudi Arabian paymasters. It pains me to say this, but I now believe that there is no person in American public life today who has a lower ratio of real to apparent integrity than Jimmy Carter. The public perception of his integrity is extraordinarily high. His real integrity, it now turns out, is extraordinarily low. He is no better than so many former American politicians who, after leaving public life, sell themselves to the highest bidder and become lobbyists for despicable causes. That is now Jimmy Carter's sad legacy.

London bombings? What London bombings?

The U.S. announced on Friday that it captured the mastermind behind the 7/7/2005 bombings in London.

But you would not know it by reading the New York Times, the Washington Post or the Associated Press.

None of them mentioned the London bombings in reporting on the capture of the man who organized that attack, Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi (aka, Abu Abdallah).

Instead, reporters concentrated on where this major player in the war on terrorism was held after his capture.

Incredible.

The failure to disclose to readers that he masterminded the 7/7 bombings further erodes the credibility of the American press, as readers like me outsource the job of gathering facts to the Times of London.

Oh, and he was once a major in Saddam Hussein’s army. The American press failed to report that as well. The Times of London? Paragraph 2.

Here's how the Times of London wrote about it:

The al-Qaeda leader who is thought to have devised the plan for the July 7 suicide bombings in London and an array of terrorist plots against Britain has been captured by the Americans.

Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi, a former major in Saddam Hussein’s army, was apprehended as he tried to enter Iraq from Iran and was transferred this week to the “high-value detainee programme” at Guantanamo Bay.

Abd al-Hadi was taken into CIA custody last year, it emerged from US intelligence sources yesterday, in a move which suggests that he was interrogated for months in a “ghost prison” before being transferred to the internment camp in Cuba.

General Petraeus's Briefing

Video link.

"JohnHuang2" on the Virginia Tech Massacre

Bad day at Blacksburg (When guns are outlawed, only outlaws have guns)

Venus Ramey, Miss America 1944, was about to get robbed yet again last week at her south-central Kentucky farm, so she exercised 'gun control' by holding her snub-nosed .38-caliber weapon steady as she shot out the tires of the thief's would-be getaway car, using her walker to steady her aim with each shot. The 82-year-old pistol-packin'-mama then flagged down a passing motorist and calmly held the thief at gunpoint until the Sheriff arrived. (The Sheriff had just finished an urgent call at Donkin' Donuts.) Miss America's farm apparently was not a "gun-free zone." But according to New York Times editorials, people like Ramey would be much safer unarmed. Liberals would love to make all of America a "gun-free zone," just like they'd love to 'fix' American health care by making it one giant Walter Reed system.

The idiocy of "gun control" and 'gun-free' zoning at Virginia Tech helped get 32 of its students and teachers shot to death, so liberals insist the solution is even more gun control. And bigger 'gun-free' zoning. (New libbie slogan: People don't kill people, guns do.)

[snip]

The 'crowning jewel' of deinstitutionalization was John Kennedy's Community Mental Health Act of 1963, then came the "privacy rules" of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA), which gave us Cho. The psychiatric hospital that treated Cho couldn't legally compare notes with Virginia Tech counselors nor dean without Cho's OK as an outpatient. It's notable that just before the HIPAA Privacy and Security Acts went into effect, the big worry was the cost of compliance. And with its complexity, nobody was ready to shoot from the HIPAA. At Virginia Tech, the cost of compliance consisted of 32 dead students and teachers. Because when guns are outlawed, the only one shooting from the hip is the outlaw. Liberals have blood on their hands.

"Green" Democratic Presidential Candidates Foul the Air

Ah, to be a presidential candidate and a Democrat. You have absolution to foul the air with not just your pronouncements and your ideas, but also your jet fumes ... and at cut-rate fares.

A flock of small jets took flight from Washington Thursday, each carrying a Democratic presidential candidate to South Carolina for the first debate of the political season.

For Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton, Barack Obama, Chris Dodd and Joe Biden, it was wheels up shortly after they voted in favor of legislation requiring that U.S. troops begin returning home from Iraq in the fall.

No one jet pooled, no one took commercial flights to save money, fuel or emissions.

All but Biden, who flew on a private jet, chartered their flights -- a campaign expense of between $7,500 and $9,000.

Guess which one of these despoilers of the mental, moral and physical environment is going to get the "Green" vote. Just as the NAGS lined up in support of Bill Clinton "lie down and enjoy it." It's what they do.

Who Started the Jessica Lynch - "HERO" -Myth?

Would you believe The Washington Post?

Read the whole thing at Protein Wisdom.

Says Ray Robinson in The American Thinker:

I challenge The Washington Post to identify this source so that this
person can be questioned in the current proceedings.

Back to Backbone: History is fundamental. (Fred Thompson on NR)

By now, we’re used to people like Iranian President Ahmadinejad denying that the Holocaust ever happened, even while he and his regime promise not only the destruction of Israel but the elimination of Jews internationally.

It’s bad enough hearing from a distance about the bizarre anti-Semitic theories taught by heads of state as well as schools and religious leaders. Now, according to a study funded by the British government, we find out that some schools in Great Britain have stopped teaching history that is offensive to Muslim students. The topics that have been erased from the curriculum, the study found, include both the Nazi genocide and the Crusades.

Read the whole thing...

Global warming debate 'irrational': scientists

Another scientist chimes in:

The current debate about global warming is "completely irrational," and people need to start taking a different approach, say two Ottawa scientists.

Carleton University science professor Tim Patterson said global warming will not bring about the downfall of life on the planet.

Patterson said much of the up-to-date research indicates that "changes in the brightness of the sun" are almost certainly the primary cause of the warming trend since the end of the "Little Ice Age" in the late 19th century. Human emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2), the gas of concern in most plans to curb climate change, appear to have little effect on global climate, he said.

The Tech Massacre: Va. Tech Gunman Fired 170-Plus Shots

In a previous post I mentioned that the reason that Cho’s rampage probably ended when he ran out of ammunition. Firing 170 shots is not totally determinative, but that’s a lot of bullets and we can probably conclude, absent further evidence showing how much ammo he had left, that the massacre ended on Cho’s initiative, not because of any police or student initiative.

That’s why so-called “gun free zones” are much more likely to result in massacres like the one at Tech. the ability of someone like Cho to shoot and shoot and shoot defenseless victims is reprehensible. And what is particularly reprehensible is that the victims were defenseless on purpose due to a policy set in place by the Tech administration.

But what is infuriating about this article is this:

But they said investigators still don't know why Cho launched the bloody attack on his fellow students at Virginia Tech.

"We talk about possible motives and theories and whatnot, but we don't have any evidence to suggest anything," said State Police Superintendent Col. W. Steven Flaherty.

He said investigators had searched computer files, cell phone records and e-mails, and had compiled 500 piece of evidence from Norris Hall alone.

Yet so far, nothing indicated a motive or close link between the 23- year-old loner and his victims, Flaherty said.

This kind of “reporting” makes you want to scream! Cho took the time to make a movie filled with hatred and chock-full of motive. What the hell are the police looking for? Do they think he was just kidding when he made his video and there are hidden reasons for his actions?

In between, a package was mailed to NBC containing Cho's videotaped tirade and written manifesto about rich "brats" and their "hedonistic needs."

What is it about this case when police and reporters don’t want to take “yes, I hate you and want to kill you” as the answer?

The Carbon Offset Scam

From the Financial Times:

Companies and individuals rushing to go green have been spending millions on “carbon credit” projects that yield few if any environmental benefits.

A Financial Times investigation has uncovered widespread failings in the new markets for greenhouse gases, suggesting some organisations are paying for emissions reductions that do not take place.

Others are meanwhile making big profits from carbon trading for very small expenditure and in some cases for clean-ups that they would have made anyway.

Trading in “carbon offsets” is arguably the worst opening for scams and fraud that has been invented in this century. There is not even a good definition of what a “carbon offset” is and those who sell them can virtually make up the value of the product that they sell. How, after all, do you check on the existence of a carbon offset? Some carbon offsets are simply promises to plant some trees at some time in the future. Meanwhile, you can fly your Learjet or Gulfstream and claim that your so-called “carbon footprint” is zero.

Not since the emperor’s new clothes has a scam of this magnitude been perpetrated.

The FT investigation found:

■ Widespread instances of people and organisations buying worthless credits that do not yield any reductions in carbon emissions.

■ Industrial companies profiting from doing very little – or from gaining carbon credits on the basis of efficiency gains from which they have already benefited substantially.

■ Brokers providing services of questionable or no value.

■ A shortage of verification, making it difficult for buyers to assess the true value of carbon credits.

Send Moyers, Guns, And Money

Extreme Mortman and his commenters take Bill Moyers and Tom Shales apart. It's fun to watch.

When Moonbats Snap... Nut Threatens Republicans With Rifle!

He pulled the rifle from the trunk of his Mercedes, removed the Bush & Cheney pictures from the office, and promised to be back if Bush vetoed the emergency war spending bill!" -Nevada Republican Party Executive Director Zachary Moyle.

McCain Blasts Harry Reid- Congressional Leaders Demand His Resignation!!

"What I think Senator Reid has lost sight of...
Presidents don't lose wars.
Political parties don't lose wars.
Nations lose wars.
And, when nations lose wars, nations suffer."

Senator John McCain
with Sean Hannity
April 24, 2007

Listen to the interview. Click on the link.

Silencing Criticism: The history of sham arguments for McCain-Feingold

I do not like Senator McCain for a number of reasons, but by far the most compelling to me it the fact that he, and Russ Feingold, have made the most egregious attack on the first Amendment since the Alien and Sedition acts of 1798. How dared this son of privilege try to silence criticisms of himself because he suffers from a guilty conscience after accepting bribes from Charles keating. I expect it from closet totalitarians like Feingold, coming from McCain, its' a stab in the back.

Here is James Bopp, jr. with a history of this infamous bill:

In 2002, Congress adopted the McCain-Feingold campaign-finance law. As part of this new law, Congress prohibited corporations and labor unions from running “electioneering communications” — i.e., advertisements naming a candidate, including incumbent officeholders seeking reelection, broadcast to the candidate’s constituents — within 30 days of a primary or 60 days of a general election. Touted as necessary to eliminate “sham” issue ads that were really intended to elect or defeat a candidate, it is now apparent that the story of McCain-Feingold is itself replete with shams. This so-called “electioneering communication” prohibition is simply the latest permutation of the ancient and persistent impulse of government officials to quash criticism of their actions.

Faux Grassroots and Dissimulations
Grassroots support for McCain-Feingold turns out to have been largely a sham. Sean Treglia, the former program officer for campaign-finance reform at the Pew Charitable Trusts, boasted that, over the course of the seven years, he had directed $30 million, with Pew “in the background,” to “drive public policy” by “creat[ing] an impression that a mass movement was afoot,” “a constituency that would punish Congress if they didn’t vote for reform.” The calls to “stop the wealthy” from influencing government policy were actually generated by $140 million in grants from wealthy foundations like Pew: $123 million came from just eight foundations, and $104 million went to just 17 “campaign finance reform” organizations. Something was afoot, but it was certainly no mass movement; the constituency for McCain-Feingold was a sham.

Read the rest...

Is Sheryl Crow Secretly on Big Oil's Payroll?

How else to make sense, for example, of the two women’s view that toilet paper should be rationed to one square per trip to the potty. In response, politicians, environmental experts and media opinionators left and right spent Monday poo-pooing such a goofy idea. Even far-left monster mouth Rosie O’Donnell got into the scatological act as David and Crow became worldwide laughingstocks.

Jokes about toilet paper rationing thus became the introduction to global warming for millions of people from Australia to Zimbabwe. And there’s the payoff for Big Oil — it’s hard to take global warming seriously when people are laughing in the water closet.

Ha!

VERY IMPORTANT: The Revelle-Gore Story: Attempted Political Suppression of Science

By S. Fred Singer:

This is a personal account linking efforts to suppress scientific publication about climate science and policy by then-Senator (later vice president) Al Gore and his staff.

In those efforts, an individual working closely with Senator Gore and his staff made false and damaging statements about my behavior as a scientist.

I filed a libel suit against the individual. The suit was settled when he issued a retraction and apology to me that included a statement that members of Senator Gore’s staff had made “similar statements and insinuations” to those that he retracted.

CLICK ON THE LINK FOR THE WHOLE STORY.

Al Gore has a history of trying to silence his critics by any means, fair of foul.

Hat tip to Oeconomicus as Free Republic.

FRED THOMPSON TEARS DOWN THE FOURTH WALL

Maggie Gallagher reports on the fact that Fred Thompson is breaking through the barrier that the press interposes between the people and the candidates; the people and public officials. The last politician who was able to do that with ease was Ronald Reagan. Perhaps we need an actor in the White House.

...this week, in an exchange with National Review senior editor Ramesh Ponnuru, Fred Thompson tore down that fourth wall, separating him -- a potential leader of the Free World -- and us, folks who chat for a living.
...For example, on his opposition to a bill that would federally regulate lawyer's fees in tobacco cases: "Get this: Under the amendment the states would have been required to send the attorneys' bills to the House and Senate Judiciary for approval," riffs Thompson. "As I said on the floor on May 19, 1998, 'I did not come to the Senate to review billing records from lawyers in private lawsuits.'

"For the record, I oppose the federal regulation of any fees negotiated by two competent parties at the state and local level. This goes for lawyers, doctors, butchers, bakers, or the occasional candlestick maker ...

"This discussion," Fred Thompson goes on to say, "is not an idle exercise. Republicans have struggled in recent years, because they have strayed from basic principles. Federalism is one of those principles."

It's one of those small incidents that speak volumes. Can you imagine McCain or Giuliani personally debating a senior editor on National Review's Web site? By tearing down the fourth wall, Fred Thompson announced to conservatives, more eloquently than even his words could, that he really is one of us.

And he reads National Review!

The Will of the Uninformed [Misinformed]

Fox New is frequently accused of spreading falsehoods because a larger number of its audience – compared to other networks - believe that Saddam had something to do with al-Qaida or 9/11.

Jonah Goldberg poses an interesting question:

...if 31 percent of Americans don’t know who the vice president is, fewer than half are aware that Nancy Pelosi is the speaker of the House, a mere 29 percent can identify “Scooter” Libby as the convicted former chief of staff of the vice president, and only 15 percent can name Harry Reid when asked who is the Senate majority leader … why do two-thirds of Americans believe that Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales’ firing of eight U.S. attorneys was “politically motivated?”

Conceding the fact that there is literally nothing that goes on in Washington that is not “politically motivated,” in this case we must assume that people who answered the question in the affirmative believe a crime was committed. But even the Democrats in congress have not made that accusation.

So, we are supposed to believe that two-thirds of Americans have studied the details of the U.S. attorney firings and come to an informed conclusion that they were politically motivated — even when Senate Democrats agree that there is no actual evidence that Gonzales did anything improper. Are these the same people who couldn’t pick Pelosi out of a lineup? Or the 85 percent who couldn’t name the Senate majority leader? Are we to imagine that the 31 percent of the electorate who still — after seven years of headlines and demonization — can’t identify the vice president of the United States nonetheless have a studied opinion on the firing of New Mexico U.S. Attorney David Iglesias?

[asks Goldberg]

The answer, dear friends, is that the people who may not be able to associate the name of Dick Cheney with the office of Vice President undoubtedly are victims of the MSM who have spared no expense to make sure that the worst possible inferences of the Democrats in Congress regarding this administration become the conventional wisdom.

As they did in the Duke non-rape case, as they did in the misreporting in the aftermath of Katrina and as they did by giving mass-murderer Cho his posthumous fame.

Duke Lacrosse: Stephen Miller's Farewell. Fantastic!

Hat tip, Durham in Wonderland.

For many at Duke, the last year offered a horrifying tutorial in the moral bankruptcy of the left's politically correct orthodoxy and the corruption of our culture at its hands.

Three of our peers faced a devastating year-long persecution because they were white and their accuser black. Imagine that Collin, Reade and David had been black students, accused of raping a white girl and that they faced a witchhunt led by a prosecutor re-elected thanks to the overwhelming support of the white community. Then imagine this witchhunt was supported by hordes of student protesters, prominent white activists and a large portion of an elite campus faculty, many of them affiliated with the European Studies Department. Imagine also that the University president suspends the almost all-black sports team of which these students are members and fires their black coach. Further imagine that the accuser in the case has continually changed her story from the first night, that there is no evidence against the players, that they've cooperated with the police and passed polygraphs and that extensive evidence exists to prove their innocence.

You think that scenario would have lasted for a year? Try a week

.

Financial Statistics of Note

ONE RECORD, ANOTHER WAY OFF - The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed at 12,962 last Friday (4/20/07), setting an all-time closing high for the 111-year old index. On the same day that the Dow was setting a new record close (its 12th record high in 2006), the NASDAQ Composite closed at 2526, just over half of its 5049 all-time closing high set on 3/10/00. Thus, all the NASDAQ has to do is double in value to get back to its record setting level of 7-years ago (source: BTN Research).
2. SMALL-CAP RECORD - The small-cap Russell 2000 closed at 831 last Monday (4/16/07), setting an all-time record close. As of the end of that day, the Russell 2000 was up +12% on a trailing 1-year basis, +14% per year on a trailing 3-year basis, and +11% per year on a trailing 5-year basis. The Russell 2000 was introduced in 1988 (source: Russell).
3. STAYING POWER - Of the 10 largest capitalized stocks in the S&P 500 as of 12/31/96, 4 of the stocks were still ranked in the top 10 a decade later as of 12/31/06 (source: S&P).
4. MORE THAN INFLATION - The S&P 500 was up +11.8% for the year ending 3/31/07 while the Lehman Brothers Aggregate bond index was up +6.6%, both results greater than the +2.8% rate of inflation the country experienced over the 12-month period. The Lehman Brothers Aggregate bond index is calculated using 6,000 publicly traded government and corporate bonds with an average maturity of 10 years. The consumer price index is the measure of inflation that was used and is compiled by the US Bureau of Labor Studies (source: S&P, Lehman Brothers, and Department of Labor).
5. A GLOBAL MARKETPLACE - Just under 50% of the revenues from the 30 Dow stocks is generated from the foreign operations of the companies in the index (source: AP, Boston Globe).
6. CURRENCY TRIVIA - The global financial markets may be forecasting rising interest rates in Europe and flat to falling interest rates in the USA. This conclusion can be reached as a result of a rising euro and falling dollar. The euro finished at its highest closing value vs. the dollar last Thursday ($1.3603) since 12/30/04 (source: BTN Research).
7. MORE WORKERS - The unemployment rate in the USA was 4.4% as of 3/31/07, down 0.3% in the last 12 months, equal to 287,000 fewer idled workers today when compared to figures from a year ago (source: DOL).
8. SLOWING DOWN - The drop in the nation's jobless rate to 4.4% last month, its lowest level in 6 years, occurring while our economy is slowing, suggests that our nation's growth in productivity (i.e., output per hour of work) has waned. Over the 2 decades from 1976-1995, productivity grew by +1.5% per year, almost half of the +2.8% annual growth in productivity from 1996-2005. Last year (2006), productivity growth was only +1.6% (source: DOL).
9. WHO SELLS THE MOST? - The # 1 exporter in the world is Germany, ranked ahead of # 2, China and # 3, the United States (source: Financial Times).
10. SOME PROGRESS - China's $233 billion trade deficit with the USA last year (i.e., their exports to us exceeding our exports to them) has been a source of tension between the two economic superpowers. China however is expected to conduct a 4-city tour (Atlanta, Chicago, San Francisco and Washington D.C.) in May 2007 where purchases of $12 billion of American goods will be announced (source: Financial Times).
11. IT'S NOT AGE 65? - More than 4 out of every 5 Americans (82%) do not know the age at which they qualify for full retirement benefits from Social Security (source: Employee Benefit Research Institute).
12. THIRTYSOMETHING - 58% of Americans began saving for their future retirement before age 30 (source: Transamerica Retirement Services).
13. WHERE THE MONEY IS - The top 1% of US taxpayers (based upon adjusted gross income) pays 37% of all federal income tax. Twenty years ago (1987), this top income group paid 25% of all taxes (source: IRS).
14. HOME SWEET HOME - A single-family home went on the market for sale at $125 million early this month in Los Angeles. The 45,000 square-foot home is owned by a 46-year old woman (source: Wall Street Journal).
15. FUTURE OLYMPICS - The city of Chicago has been selected by the US Olympic committee as the American city that will submit a bid to host the 2016 Summer Olympic Games. Chicago has 2 ½ years to put its bid together (the winning city will be selected in October 2009), expected to contain an operating budget of $5 billion. The 2008 Summer Games will be held in Beijing and the 2012 games are in London (source: Financial Times).

Mark Steyn: Reverse Assimilation

Mark Steyn discussed demographics in Canada.

If native Canadians (if you'll forgive the expression) are already a 25 per cent minority in the country's population growth, they will be a small and ever smaller minority in the Canada of the future. Indeed, they're already at such a low demographic ebb that it calls into question any kind of trans-generational inheritance: "Canada" is in danger of becoming merely a zip code. The novelty junkies have a point: maybe it is time to rewrite that "home and native land" lyric.

Prior to the boom of the nineties and oughts, the all-time blockbuster immigration year was 1913, when 400,000 "new Canadians" arrived. Whether they looked at it like that is another matter: most of them were British subjects moving from one part of His Majesty's realms to another. In that sense, it was not "immigration" at all, or not as currently understood. The 2006 census numbers take as a given that the Canada of the 21st century will be a project built almost exclusively by foreigners.

Not only is the Canadian state insouciant about this ultimate outsourcing, it welcomes and celebrates it. For example, anti-monarchists such as John Manley and Brian Tobin routinely build their case on the line that in an ever more diverse Canada immigrants from Syria and Belarus can't be expected to relate to the Royal Family. This would be a very curious argument even in countries with robust immigration traditions--that a foreigner admitted by the state at its discretion should have the right to decide not which of his old country's customs he was going to retain but which of his new country's customs he was prepared to accept. It would ring very odd in most places--go on, get a job in Saudi Arabia, and try the same line on their royal family. So, when we buy the Manley-Tobin pitch, we're essentially accepting the principle of reverse assimilation, the obligation that Canadians assimilate with immigrants rather than the other way round.

And thereby lies great peril. Not for the Queen. She'll get by, whatever Canadians decide. But the Manley-Tobin line raises some very interesting questions. If our Liberal grandees are so convinced new Canadians won't accept the Crown, what other features of our inheritance will they also reject? How many Canadians will be saying "eh?" in 20 years' time? Or following hockey (assuming there are still any hockey teams up here)? How many will recognize "Sir John A. Macdonald"? What would such a nation be remembering on Remembrance Day?