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Labels: global warming Labels: gun rights Labels: terrorism Labels: humor Labels: humor, Idaho politics Labels: terrorism Labels: deinstitutionalization, gun rights Labels: freedom of speech Labels: low standards of journalism Labels: gun rights Labels: humor Labels: economics Labels: freedom of religion, homosexuality Labels: politicians behaving badly Labels: political correctness Labels: decline and fall of Western civilization Labels: concealed carry, gun rights Labels: gun rights Labels: gun rights Labels: 2008 presidential candidates, gun rights Labels: health care Labels: health care Labels: constitutional history, homosexuality Labels: politicians behaving badly Labels: deinstitutionalization Labels: freedom of speech, politicians behaving badly Alan Greenspan, the former Federal Reserve chairman, said in an interview that the removal of Saddam Hussein had been "essential" to secure world oil supplies, a point he emphasized to the White House in private conversations before the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Greenspan, who was the country's top voice on monetary policy at the time Bush decided to go to war in Iraq, has refrained from extensive public comment on it until now, but he made the striking comment in a new memoir out today that "the Iraq War is largely about oil." In the interview, he clarified that sentence in his 531-page book, saying that while securing global oil supplies was "not the administration's motive," he had presented the White House with the case for why removing Hussein was important for the global economy. "I was not saying that that's the administration's motive," Greenspan said in an interview Saturday, "I'm just saying that if somebody asked me, 'Are we fortunate in taking out Saddam?' I would say it was essential." He said that in his discussions with President Bush and Vice President Cheney, "I have never heard them basically say, 'We've got to protect the oil supplies of the world,' but that would have been my motive." Greenspan said that he made his economic argument to White House officials and that one lower-level official, whom he declined to identify, told him, "Well, unfortunately, we can't talk about oil." Asked if he had made his point to Cheney specifically, Greenspan said yes, then added, "I talked to everybody about that." Greenspan said he had backed Hussein's ouster, either through war or covert action. "I wasn't arguing for war per se," he said. But "to take [Hussein] out, in my judgment, it was something important for the West to do and essential, but I never saw Plan B" -- an alternative to war. Critics of the administration have often argued that while Bush cited Hussein's pursuit of weapons of mass destruction and despotic rule as reasons for the invasion, he was also motivated by a desire to gain access to Iraq's vast oil reserves. Publicly, little evidence has emerged to support that view, although a top-secret National Security Presidential Directive, titled "Iraq: Goals, Objectives and Strategy" and signed by Bush in August 2002 -- seven months before the invasion -- listed as one of many objectives "to minimize disruption in international oil markets." Though Greenspan's book is largely silent about Iraq, it is sharply critical of Bush and fellow Republicans on other matters, denouncing in particular what Greenspan calls the president's lack of fiscal discipline and the "dysfunctional government" he has presided over. In the interview, Greenspan said he had previously told Bush and Cheney of his critique. "They're not surprised by my conclusions," he said. As for Iraq, Greenspan said that at the time of the invasion, he believed, like Bush, that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction "because Saddam was acting so guiltily trying to protect something." While he was "reasonably sure he did not have an atomic weapon," he added, "my view was that if we do nothing, eventually he would gain control of a weapon." His main support for Hussein's ouster, though, was economically motivated. "If Saddam Hussein had been head of Iraq and there was no oil under those sands," Greenspan said, "our response to him would not have been as strong as it was in the first gulf war. And the second gulf war is an extension of the first. My view is that Saddam, looking over his 30-year history, very clearly was giving evidence of moving towards controlling the Straits of Hormuz, where there are 17, 18, 19 million barrels a day" passing through. Greenspan said disruption of even 3 to 4 million barrels a day could translate into oil prices as high as $120 a barrel -- far above even the recent highs of $80 set last week -- and the loss of anything more would mean "chaos" to the global economy. Given that, "I'm saying taking Saddam out was essential," he said. But he added that he was not implying that the war was an oil grab. "No, no, no," he said. Getting rid of Hussein achieved the purpose of "making certain that the existing system [of oil markets] continues to work, frankly, until we find other [energy supplies], which ultimately we will." Labels: Iraqi WMDs, terrorism Labels: humor When he leaves his tidy apartment in an ocean-side city somewhere in America, Aaron turns on the radio to a light rock station. "For the cat," he explains, "so she won't get lonely." He's short and balding and dressed mostly in black, and right before I turn on the recorder, he asks me for the dozenth time to guarantee that I won't reveal his name or anything else that might identify him. "I don't want to be a target for gay activists," he says as we head out into the misty day. "Harassment like that I just don't need." "It turns out that I didn't have the faintest idea what love was," he says. That's not all he didn't know. He also didn't know that his same-sex attraction, far from being inborn and inescapable, was a thirst for the love that he had not received from his father, a cold and distant man prone to angry outbursts, coupled with a fear of women kindled by his intrusive and overbearing mother, all of which added up to a man who wanted to have sex with other men just so he could get some male attention. He didn't understand any of this, he tells me, until he found a reparative therapist whom he consulted by phone for nearly 10 years, attended weekend workshops, and learned how to "be a man." Aaron interrupts himself to eye a woman in shorts jogging by. "Sometimes there are very good-looking women at this boardwalk," he says. "Especially when they're not bundled up." He remembers when he started noticing women's bodies, a few years into his therapy. "The first thing I noticed was their legs. The curve of their legs." He's dated women, had sex with them even, although "I was pretty awkward," he says. "It just didn't work." Aaron has a theory about this: "I never used my body in a sexual way. I think the men who actually act it out have a greater success in terms of being sexual with women than the men who didn't act it out." Not surprisingly, he's never had a long-term relationship, and he's pessimistic about his prospects. "I can't make that jump from having this attraction to doing something about it." But, he adds, it's wrong to think "if you don't make it with women, then you haven't changed." The important thing is that "now I like myself. I'm not emotionally shut down. I'm comfortable in my own body. I don't have to be drawn to men anymore. I'm content at this point to lead an asexual life, which is what I've done for most of my life anyway." He adds, "I'm a very detached person." Labels: homosexuality Labels: terrorism Labels: humor GRAND RAPIDS -- Should teachers and principals be allowed to carry guns on the job? Response to that question surprised James Ballard, executive director of the Michigan Association of Secondary School Principals, when he sent an e-mail survey to the state's high school and middle school principals. One-third of those who responded leaned toward armed schools. "It did surprise me it was that high," Ballard said Tuesday. "Some feel strongly they should be able to carry a concealed weapon. "There are some, just as in any population, that feel carrying a weapon produces more safety." Ballard conducted the unscientific survey of his nearly 2,000 association members Monday after learning about legislation pending in the state House. State Rep. David Agema, R-Grandville, introduced the legislation this month, saying guns could avert repeats of massacres such as at Columbine High School in Colorado and Virginia Tech. He was supported by 15 Republican representatives. The bill would let teachers, administrators or other school employees carry concealed weapons on school grounds if they have a state permit and permission from their school. The school could require special weapons training. Agema said he considers the bill "disaster-preparedness." Instead of teachers carrying concealed guns, he envisions a few, hand-picked and trained teachers with access to guns in locked safes. The legislation was quickly criticized by local school administrators, including Grand Rapids Superintendent Bernard Taylor and school security chiefs, who said armed teachers and principals would make schools more dangerous. Michigan Education Association Director Doug Pratt said he was "appalled that a bill like this would even come up." The MEA, which represents 160,000 public school employees, has "always stood for weapons-free schools to keep our students safe," he said. Labels: gun rights LAST week saw an outcry over the unfairness and content of MoveOn.org's New York Times ad belittling Gen. David Petraeus as "General Betray Us." But the episode also illustrates a much more fundamental problem with campaign-finance regulations - the advantage that these laws give to the institutional press over ordinary citizens. It's time to admit the unenforceability and hidden favoritism of campaign-finance regulations. As The Post reported, MoveOn may have received a massive and illegal in-kind contribution from the Times. The group paid some $65,000, but Abbe Serphos, director of public relations for the Times, told The Post that "the open rate for an ad of that size and type is $181,692." Another reporter who called the Times was quoted a rate of $167,000 for a full-page ad run on a Monday (as MoveOn's was). Meanwhile, an official for the pro-Iraq policy group Freedom's Watch told ABC that his group was charged "significantly more" when it bought a full-page Times ad. Rudy Giuliani's ad on Friday also received the same preferential treatment - but only, it appears, because MoveOn's preferential rate was discovered. Any way you cut it, MoveOn got a sweet deal from the Times. Indeed, the American Conservative Union has filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission, charging MoveOn and the Times with violating the campaign-finance laws. MoveOn clearly thought it was running a political message that might influence the '08 elections - paying for the ad via its Political Action Committee, and even including a disclaimer like those mandated by federal campaign-finance law that the ad was "not authorized by any candidate." Labels: freedom of speech Ever since its Last year, the Ozone Hole was the biggest on record, according to NASA. (The biggest since 1985, of course.) Ouch! But to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Montreal Protocol, scientists are claiming "success." Apparently, success is not defined in terms of appreciable shrinking of the Ozone Hole, but by the promulgation of regulations which (it is asserted) will cause the Ozone Hole to shrink by reducing the chemicals said to cause Ozone depletion. Thus, regulation of anthropogenic global warming will work! Labels: global warming Labels: photography TRENTON, N.J. (AP) - It's a fashion that started in prison, and now the saggy pants craze has come full circle - low-slung street strutting in some cities may soon mean run-ins with the law, including a stint in jail. Proposals to ban saggy pants are starting to ride up in several places. At the extreme end, wearing pants low enough to show boxers or bare buttocks in one small Louisiana town means six months in jail and a $500 fine. A crackdown also is being pushed in Atlanta. And in Trenton, getting caught with your pants down may soon result in not only a fine, but a city worker assessing where your life is headed. "Are they employed? Do they have a high school diploma? It's a wonderful way to redirect at that point," said Trenton Councilwoman Annette Lartigue, who is drafting a law to outlaw saggy pants. "The message is clear: We don't want to see your backside." The bare-your-britches fashion is believed to have started in prisons, where inmates aren't given belts with their baggy uniform pants to prevent hangings and beatings. By the late 80s, the trend had made it to gangster rap videos, then went on to skateboarders in the suburbs and high school hallways. "For young people, it's a form of rebellion and identity," Adrian "Easy A.D." Harris, 43, a founding member of the Bronx's legendary rap group Cold Crush Brothers. "The young people think it's fashionable. They don't think it's negative." But for those who want to stop them see it as an indecent, sloppy trend that is a bad influence on children. "It has the potential to catch on with elementary school kids, and we want to stop it before it gets there," said C.T. Martin, an Atlanta councilman. "Teachers have raised questions about what a distraction it is." Labels: vulgarity Are liberals smarter than conservatives? It looks that way, according to a study published this week in Nature Neuroscience. In a rapid response test—you press a button if you're given one signal, but not if you're given a different signal—the authors found that conservatives were "more likely to make errors of commission," whereas "stronger liberalism was correlated with greater accuracy." They concluded that "a more conservative orientation is related to greater persistence in a habitual response pattern, despite signals that this response pattern should change." Does this mean liberal brains are fitter? Apparently. "Liberals are more responsive to informational complexity, ambiguity and novelty," the authors wrote. New York University, which helped fund the study, concluded, "Liberals are more likely than are conservatives to respond to cues signaling the need to change habitual responses." The study's lead author, NYU professor David Amodio, told London's Daily Telegraph that "liberals tended to be more sensitive and responsive to information that might conflict with their habitual way of thinking." 1. Habitual ways of thinking. Here's what the experiment actually entailed, according to the authors' supplementary document: [E]ither the letter "M" or "W" was presented in the center of a computer monitor screen. … Half of the participants were instructed to make a "Go" response when they saw "M" but to make no response when they saw "W"; the remaining participants completed a version in which "W" was the Go stimulus and "M" was the No–Go stimulus. … Responses were registered on a computer keyboard placed in the participants' laps. … Participants received a two-minute break halfway through the task, which took approximately 15 minutes to complete. Fifteen minutes is a habit? Tapping a keyboard is a way of thinking? Come on. You can make a case for conservative inflexibility, but not with this study. 2. Responsiveness to information. Again, let's consult the supplementary document: Each trial began with a fixation point, presented for 500 ms. The target then appeared for 100 ms, followed by a blank screen. Participants were instructed to respond within 500 ms of target onset. A "Too slow!" warning message appeared after responses that exceeded this deadline, and "Incorrect" feedback was given after erroneous responses. An "ms"—millisecond—is one-thousandth of a second. That means participants had one-tenth of a second to look at the letter and another four-tenths of a second to hit the button. One letter, one-tenth of a second. This is "information"? Labels: decline and fall of Western civilization Ever since the Defense Department procurement scandals of the 1980s, the $600 hammer has been held up as an icon of Pentagon incompetence. Immortalized in the "Hammer Awards" that Vice President Al Gore's program to reinvent government gives out to waste-cutters, this absurdly overpriced piece of hardware has come to symbolize all that's wrong with the government's financial management. One problem: "There never was a $600 hammer," said Steven Kelman, public policy professor at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government and a former administrator of the Office of Federal Procurement Policy. It was, he said, "an accounting artifact." The military bought the hammer, Kelman explained, bundled into one bulk purchase of many different spare parts. But when the contractors allocated their engineering expenses among the individual spare parts on the list - a bookkeeping exercise that had no effect on the price the Pentagon paid overall - they simply treated every item the same. So the hammer, originally $15, picked up the same amount of research and development overhead - $420 - as each of the highly technical components, recalled retired procurement official LeRoy Haugh. (Later news stories inflated the $435 figure to $600.) "The hammer got as much overhead as an engine," Kelman continued, despite the fact that the hammer cost much less than $420 to develop, and the engine cost much more - "but nobody ever said, 'What a great deal the government got on the engine!' " Thus retold, the legend of the $600 hammer becomes a different kind of cautionary tale. It is no longer about simple, obvious waste. The new moral is that numbers, taken as self-explanatory truths by the public and the press, can in fact be the woefully distorted products of a broken accounting system. The root of the problem is as old as the Republic: Federal accounting has always been primarily concerned with making sure money was spent as Congress directed - not with making sure it was spent wisely. Historically, explained the Pentagon's deputy chief financial officer, Nelson Toye, DoD's bookkeeping systems were designed to "be able to satisfy the Congress that we were good stewards of the funds entrusted to us: We didn't overspend, we did spend it on what you asked us to, we didn't spend money to buy things you told us we couldn't buy." In the past, Toye said, "there has not been a requirement for DoD or any federal agency to routinely collect the costs of its assets and report those costs." Labels: health care Labels: humor
Never forget!
I ran for Idaho state senate in 2008--didn't win
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Which James Hansen Was Right?
The 1971 version? Or the 2007 version? From September 21, 2007 Investors Business Daily:Climate Change: Did NASA scientist James Hansen, the global warming alarmist in chief, once believe we were headed for . . . an ice age? An old Washington Post story indicates he did.
And I guess you could ask the question: why should we assume that the guy that had it wrong in 1971 has it right today?
On July 9, 1971, the Post published a story headlined "U.S. Scientist Sees New Ice Age Coming." It told of a prediction by NASA and Columbia University scientist S.I. Rasool. The culprit: man's use of fossil fuels.
The Post reported that Rasool, writing in Science, argued that in "the next 50 years" fine dust that humans discharge into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuel will screen out so much of the sun's rays that the Earth's average temperature could fall by six degrees.
Sustained emissions over five to 10 years, Rasool claimed, "could be sufficient to trigger an ice age."
Aiding Rasool's research, the Post reported, was a "computer program developed by Dr. James Hansen," who was, according to his resume, a Columbia University research associate at the time.
So what about those greenhouse gases that man pumps into the skies? Weren't they worried about them causing a greenhouse effect that would heat the planet, as Hansen, Al Gore and a host of others so fervently believe today?
"They found no need to worry about the carbon dioxide fuel-burning puts in the atmosphere," the Post said in the story, which was spotted last week by Washington resident John Lockwood, who was doing research at the Library of Congress and alerted the Washington Times to his finding.
Hansen has some explaining to do. The public deserves to know how he was converted from an apparent believer in a coming ice age who had no worries about greenhouse gas emissions to a global warming fear monger.
This is a man, as Lockwood noted in his message to the Times' John McCaslin, who has called those skeptical of his global warming theory "court jesters." We wonder: What choice words did he have for those who were skeptical of the ice age theory in 1971?
People can change their positions based on new information or by taking a closer or more open-minded look at what is already known. There's nothing wrong with a reversal or modification of views as long as it is arrived at honestly.
This Might Seem a Bit Extreme At First
Convicted felons may not possess firearms or ammunition--even a single round. The theory is that if you find a convicted felon with ammunition, he's probably not in possession of it for old times sake, or as a good luck charm, but as evidence that he has been in possession of a firearm recently, and is too careless to do a proper search of himself for ammo. From the September 21, 2007 Idaho Statesman:A former Northside street gang member was sentenced Thursday in federal court to 32 months in prison for being a convicted felon in possession of a single .45 caliber round of ammunition.
This being Idaho, the first comment was complaining about the light sentence!
...
After he completes his prison term, Mendoza will be on supervised release for three years, during which he may have no contact with any gang member or gang paraphernalia.
Mendoza was arrested after officers located one round of ammunition in his front pants pocket. He had previously been convicted of grand theft and possession of a controlled substance in Canyon County. Under federal law, it is illegal for a convicted felon to possess either a firearm or ammunition. This was Mendoza’s 13th adult criminal conviction.
I have a few misgivings about the failure of federal law to distinguish between violent felonies and federal felonies such as turning back a car odometer, but Mendoza doesn't sound like someone who deserves much sympathy.
Preparing for President Nut Job's Address to Columbia
Great poster that you really should click here to see. Don't worry, it's worksafe, unless you work for Nazis, or some universities in the U.S.
Jewish, Maybe? Or Atheist?
Best of the Web also points out to this article that either identifies a reporter too stupid to be trusted with a pen, or too wickedly satirical to stay in that job for long. From the September 19, 2007 New York Post: September 19, 2007 -- A Queens teen was arrested yesterday after placing fliers in his teachers' mailboxes asking them to convert to Islam - then made threats once he was caught, authorities said.
What's your guess for why he was trying to get them to convert to Islam? Was he Jewish? Catholic? Atheist? Maybe Buddhist.
Yaseen Chowdhury, 17, of Woodside, wrote the fliers himself and put them in the mailboxes at the Renaissance Charter School in Jackson Heights, sources said.
When confronted there about the fliers, he made unspecified verbal threats, according to the sources.
...
The student's religion was not immediately known.
Do You Remember the Rupert Holmes Song "Escape"?
You remember--the guy who is bored "with his old lady" and responds to a personal ad--and guess who it turns out to be?
Well, it actually happened. And the results were not anywhere near as romantic or sweet as the song. The tragic details are here.
"If you like Pina Coladas
And getting caught in the rain
If you're not into yoga
If you have half a brain
If you'd like making love at midnight
In the dunes on the Cape
Then I'm the love that you've looked for
Write to me and escape."
Best of the Web pointed me to this tragic little soap opera gone bad.
Why We Should Stop Electing Congresscritters
I occasionally find myself wondering, "Is the average American as crooked and sleazy as the average member of the House and Senate?" It seems hard to imagine.
There are aspects to the political process that either favor the morally handicapped, or that cause these deficiencies. There are days that I lean towards one explanation or the other.
Many years ago, a member of the California legislature, State Senator Alan Robbins, wrote an eloquent and powerful essay from his prison cell about the corrupting effects of raising money for campaigns. I wish that I could find that essay; he talked about how very few members of the California legislature survived their first re-election campaign without being either corrupted by the need to raise huge amounts of money (bribes disguised as campaign contributions), or find themselves supporting measures of which they disapproved, because they had to make to get that money. (Here's a 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruling that explains a little of the background on the bribes that sent Robbins to the federal slammer.)
A few years earlier, the FBI had attempted to bribe a number of members of the California legislature and had no problem getting enough evidence to prosecute a number of them. Another member of the State Senate was tried (name escapes me at the moment), and some of his remarks to the undercover agents were played. "We'll have to run this through while Rose [Vuich] is out of the Capitol. She actually reads the bills!" and "Vuich isn't for sale." This was considered a remarkable situation--that a member of the state senate was not corrupt.
The shame of being revealed as an incorruptible member of the State Senate may have been too much for he; within a few weeks of these damning comments coming out, Vuich announced that she wasn't running for re-election. (After all, who is going to contribute to your campaign once they find out that they aren't getting anything for it?)
Anyway, here's the thought: instead of electing members of Congress and the state legislatures--which creates this enormous problem of bribes that pretend to be campaign contributions--why not just pick members at random from the registered voters of the district? (If anyone was randomly picked twice in a lifetime, I would demand an audit of the random selection process--and perhaps have that person start buying lottery tickets.) It's rather like being on a jury--except the pay is better.
Yes, we would probably end up with some people that aren't too smart, or too rational. Of course, we have that already. Rep. Lynne Woolsey (D-CA), for example. But I am pretty sure we couldn't do any worse than the current crop of corrupt and stupid sorts that tend to represent us in Congress.
Random selection doesn't prevent outright bribery, of course, but neither does the current system. The only good news is that outright bribery--especially if it involves people without a lot of experience being politicians--is a lot easier to spot and prosecute than "campaign contributions" being used to buy votes. If special interests want to persuade Congress to support some cause, they either have to start with a fresh batch of House members every two years (and 1/3 of the Senators every two years), or they have to persuade the entire population, in the hopes that they will be persuading the next year's Congresscritters.
My guess is that for at least some special interests, the costs of mass persuasion will be so high that some special interests may just give up. For others, they will keep up the effort, but they will be much less successful. I'll take my chances with random selection of Congresscritters--at least the moral caliber of our representatives will be improved.
Everything is For Sale on eBay
An amusing remark from Kevin Richert's blog:In the eBay economy, it seems, everything is up for bid.
Including toilet paper which, according to its sellers, came from the infamous Larry Craig stall at the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport.
Which all goes to prove three immutable truths.
1. Never underestimate the free market's never-ending power to match demand with supply.
2. Never underestimate the power of the Craig story — which, as if weighted with concrete blocks, can always manage to sink a foot or two lower.
3. If P.T. Barnum were alive today, he'd be hawking junk on eBay.
A Couple Where Both Are Members of Congress...
in different countries! The September 21, 2007 Idaho Statesman has this article about how Rep. Jerry Weller (R-IL) is not running for re-election:Republican U.S. Rep. Jerry Weller, recently named one of the most corrupt members of Congress by a watchdog group, will announce he will not seek an eighth term, a spokesman said Friday.
Well, good, he's giving some other Republican enough time to make a serious run for the seat. But here's where the story gets weird:
Weller was to make the announcement at a Joliet Region Chamber of Commerce luncheon, citing family reasons.
"I need to give my family the time needed to be a full-time father and husband," Weller said in a copy of his speech, provided to The Associated Press.
Weller's announcement comes amid a swell of scrutiny. A watchdog group recently declared him one of the most corrupt members of Congress. He's fighting a subpoena in a former colleague's bribery trial, and he faces criticism that he did not reveal to Congress the extent of Nicaraguan land purchases.The Tribune then reported that Weller's wife, Guatemalan congresswoman Zury Rios de Weller, had set up a nonprofit corporation in Illinois whose board also included Jerry Weller's mother, brother and business associate.
Is that weird, or what? A member of our Congress is married to a member of the Guatemalan Congress. I suppose it could be worse--he could be married to a member of the Iranian Parliament.
That led to questions about whether Weller should report his wife's finances to Congress. He has claimed an exemption from the rule, saying he knows nothing about her economic situation and doesn't contribute to or benefit from it.
"My husband never would do something illegal," Zury Rios de Weller told the Guatemalan newspaper Prensa Libre this week.
Declining Support For Al-Qaeda
Simon over at Classical Values points to this September 18, 2007 New York Sun article about an al-Qaeda backer who has backed away:A prominent Saudi cleric once praised by Osama bin Laden has published an open letter condemning Al Qaeda's violence.
The article goes on to quote the editor of international Arabic publication:
In the long letter published on an Arabic Web site, Cleric Salman al-Awdah calls on Mr. bin Laden to end the killing of innocent Muslims and others in terrorist acts in Iraq and elsewhere around the world.
"How much blood has been spilt? How many innocent people, children, elderly, and women have been killed, dispersed, or evicted in the name of Al-Qa'ida?" the letter says. "My brother Usama Bin Ladin, the image of Islam today is not at its best."
...
Mr. al-Awdah is an independent cleric who was jailed for several years for criticizing the Saudi government's links to America. He toned down his criticism after his release from prison in 1999, although he reportedly promoted Iraqi resistance when American troops recaptured Fallujah from Iraqi insurgents in 2004.
In the letter, Mr. al-Awdah, who has condemned terrorism in the past, appears to distance himself from terrorist acts that investigators have said were inspired by his teachings. Investigators in the Madrid train bombings, for example, have reportedly said Mr. Al-Awdah's preaching may have emboldened the attackers.
Mr. al-Awdah asks, "Have we reduced Islam to a bullet or a rifle? Has the means become an end?""Sheikh Salman al Ouda's distancing himself from Bin Laden at a time when those absolving themselves of Al Qaeda's leader have nothing to lose and no price to pay." Mr. Alhomayed wrote in an editorial published yesterday. "This comes at a time when no one is shedding any tears for the leader of Al Qaeda organization."
So perhaps al-Awdah is simply recognizing that al-Qaeda is in deep trouble, and is jumping off a sinking ship.
HR 2640 Amendments
It's in the Senate now, and as some worried, there are attempts being made to amend it--but not by the Democrats to add antigun stuff on it--but by Democrats adding stuff to make it easier for some people to carry guns. The Bitch Girls pointed me to this September 21, 2007 Wall Street Journal article that reminds us of the famous saying by Will Rogers, "I am not a member of an organized political party. I am a Democrat."In the Virginia Tech case, the shooter was able to buy firearms in part because relevant court records weren't forwarded to the National Instant Criminal Background System, the data center that helps conduct background checks.
The NRA lent its support to the bill, and to protect its flank against rivals on the right, it also won new language that for the first time allows someone banned from possessing a gun to appeal at the state level to have those rights restored. Some gun-safety advocates criticized this concession, but the bigger problem turned out to be infighting among Democratic senators.
Mr. Leahy, who dislikes federal mandates, complained that his small state would be hard-pressed to meet the House deadlines for sharing information, and therefore risked being penalized.
But it wasn't until August that he advanced his package, which ran almost 50 pages more than the House bill and added provisions that split the law-enforcement community.
Both measures promise new federal money to update records while states face future aid cuts if they don't comply. Mr. Leahy's version has a richer "carrot" and gentler "stick," narrowing the records that must be shared and giving states twice as long before mandatory penalties can be imposed.
But the chairman then also reopened a fight with Mr. Kennedy by including amendments to an existing law that allows retired law-enforcement officers to carry concealed weapons across state lines.
Enacted in 2004, the Law Enforcement Officers Safety Act continues to meet resistance from states and cities, such as New York, as an intrusion on local control.
Mr. Leahy's proposed changes would make it easier for retired officers to get around these obstacles and also lower the years of service needed to qualify to carry concealed weapons from 15 to 10.
Pressing for the changes is the 325,000-member Fraternal Order of Police, a politically influential group that claims close ties to Mr. Leahy and his top staff. The FOP says it is only asking for "tweaks" to the current law. Mr. Leahy's office argues that as a former prosecutor he has a natural alliance with the police organization and has long been active on law-enforcement legislation.
Critics of the safety Act in the law-enforcement community point to the fact that Mr. Leahy's involvement in the issue grew after a brouhaha with the New York Post over whether the Democrat was obstructing the awarding of medals of valor to police and firemen killed on Sept. 11. Sen. Leahy angrily denied the charges, and after the FOP came to his aid, he took a higher profile role in support of the bill.
Why Isn't This Freedom of Speech?
I just saw on CNN that in a town near where the Jena 6 controversy is going on, the police pulled over a red pickup truck with nooses on it. Nooses in a tree was part of the racist provocation that liberals over here are now using to justify the racially-motivated beating of a white student that is why the Jena 6 were prosecuted.
My first reaction to someone doing something like this is: In a town currently filled with angry black people? That's crazy. I notice that the driver was charged with DUI--about the high level of intelligence that I would expect of someone who would drive a pickup truck around town with nooses on it.
Will the ACLU be defending the driver's right to freedom of expression? I mean, if nude dancing is protected, and burning the American flag is protected--why not nooses on your car? Or will liberals decide that racism trumps freedom of expression?
Of course, you know my take on it: freedom of speech (which is what the Constitution protects) is not the same as freedom of expression. There is a good pragmatic argument against laws that ban burning of the American flag. People that burn the American flag tend to reduce their political influence on others. But this does not mean that flag burning is protected speech within the meaning the Framers intended.
UPDATE: Oh yes, the ACLU is now arguing that the charges against Senator Larry "Happy Feet" Craig violate his freedom of speech. According to this September 20, 2007 Idaho Statesman article:The ACLU filed its brief Monday, saying Minneapolis airport police violated Craig's constitutional right of free speech by charging him with disorderly conduct after arresting him in an airport men's room, where police say he solicited sex from an undercover officer.
So, does freedom of speech cover all solicitations to perform some action, no matter how crude or vulgar, or where it takes place, as long as the action itself is lawful? It is completely lawful to have sex with a complete stranger. If you walk down the street, asking every person you meet to have sex, I suspect that you will find yourself arrested for disorderly conduct. Perhaps the ACLU would prefer to live in that kind of a world, where the last attempts at maintaining civility are gone.
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Also, the remarks are "without substantive merit," the brief says, because the ACLU focused on free speech, and not Craig's other conduct: invading someone else's personal space in the most private of places, a bathroom stall.
The airport takes privacy in its restrooms seriously, according to the brief. Police started their undercover sting operation "on the heels of an incident in which a private citizen was seated in the stall, the individual next to him invaded the space of the adjacent stall and looked up the stall divider. The victim was so upset he waited for the defendant to come out of his stall and took him to a security checkpoint to call the police."
Who Are The Jena 6?
I haven't looked carefully into this case, which I was led to believe reflected some sort of To Kill a Mockingbird expression of Southern racism. The few news accounts that I have seen showed a bunch of nooses hung in a tree--with the implication that these were part of how the white power structure was terrorizing blacks in this little town. But now I see this summary of the case by a black columnist with the Kansas City Star, and I am disappointed (but not surprised) at how the mainstream news media have played this one:Reed Walters, the Jena district attorney, is being accused of racism because he didn’t show Bell compassion when the teenager was brought before the court for the third time on assault charges in a two-year span.
Where was our compassion long before Bell got into this kind of trouble?
That’s the question that needed to be asked in Jena and across the country on Thursday. But it wasn’t asked because everyone has been lied to about what really transpired in the small southern town.
There was no “schoolyard fight” as a result of nooses being hung on a whites-only tree.
Justin Barker, the white victim, was cold-cocked from behind, knocked unconscious and stomped by six black athletes. Barker, luckily, sustained no life-threatening injuries and was released from the hospital three hours after the attack.
A black U.S. attorney, Don Washington, investigated the “Jena Six” case and concluded that the attack on Barker had absolutely nothing to do with the noose-hanging incident three months before. The nooses and two off-campus incidents were tied to Barker’s assault by people wanting to gain sympathy for the “Jena Six” in reaction to Walters’ extreme charges of attempted murder.
Much has been written about Bell’s trial, the six-person all-white jury that convicted him of aggravated battery and conspiracy to commit aggravated battery and the clueless public defender who called no witnesses and offered no defense. It is rarely mentioned that no black people responded to the jury summonses and that Bell’s public defender was black.
Al-Qaeda's Sexual Morality
Al-Qaeda spends a lot of time contrasting what they stand for with the decadent West. And yet, there's a rather long history of al-Qaeda and its allies showing that their notion of sexual morality is "rape is okay." Most recently, one of al-Qaeda in Iraq operatives confessed to something that seems to be policy. After discussing al-Qaeda's severe enforcement of its notions of morality with respect to smoking, women being insufficiently covered, and so on, this article in the September 20, 2007 Human Events reports:Enforcement of these laws -- which can perhaps be described as Shari’a taken to the greatest extreme -- has included taking measures to brutally punish people who commit the slightest offense, from smoking, to a woman failing to cover her head in public, to a man not growing a long enough beard. The strictest social mores are to be observed and any deviation from the standard can result in a punishment consisting of torture, mutilation, or death -- including, as the western world has seen on a few occasions (though not enough to grasp the extent of its use), beheading.
This doesn't appear to be just a one-time quirk of this particular cell. Rape was a widely used weapon of war in East Timor--and al-Qaeda specifically targeted Australian tourists with the Bali bombing because Australian forces were part of what ended this reign of terror in East Timor. See this November 12, 2002 CNN report:
Unfortunately for those who might have chosen to join this hardline Islamist faction in hopes of keeping more virtuous company, the recent apprehension of a key ISI figure showed just how hypocritical – and, as if more evidence was necessary, unspeakably inhuman -- the leadership of that movement is capable of being.
Earlier this week in Samarra, the Iraqi National Police apprehended a man named Ahmed Mohammed Sabar Hamud al-Medhi al-Bazi, a key figure in a five-man ISI cell which was responsible for an attack on the National Police using an Improvised Explosive Device (IED), as well as for IED, rocket-propelled grenade (RPG), and small arms attacks on coalition forces.
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Without a bit of pressure -- indeed, without the appearance of a care in the world -- Medhi, described in graphic detail the other half of his ISI cell’s operations: running an organized al Qaeda Rape ring in Samarra. With a modus operandi of breaking into various houses and either raping women on the spot or threatening the family with death while taking their daughter away to become a hostage and a sex slave, Medhi, a self-described homosexual who engaged in intercourse (via rape) with women “because other members of this group” did, confessed to his cell’s penchant for abducing girls and “holding them [hostage] just for their pleasure.” Most recently, he said, he had taken part in the rape, kidnapping, and/or killing of five women, three of whom were supposedly still alive.
Among these most recent victims was “a twenty-five year old virgin,” who was “alone in her house” when the al Qaeda leaders “raided” it. Breaking into the house, all five members of the cell held her captive in her own home and raped her repeatedly. Finally, when all five had quenched their base desire for that action which they so brutally prohibited others from humanely engaging in, under the guise of enforcing “true Islamic law,” the terrorists departed, leaving the woman alone in her pain and misery.
If there is such a thing as “getting off easy” for a girl who is gang-raped, this first woman did just that. Two others, both age 23, met a much more gruesome fate shortly after the first, as they were taken from their houses (in front of their families), raped repeatedly by the entire al Qaeda cell, and then slaughtered. According to Medhi, their bodies were buried in a cemetery somewhere in the city.Further possible evidence of the al Qaeda connection to the Bali blasts is contained in a tape released Wednesday by the Al Jazeera TV network, purportedly of al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden. (Bin Laden praises attacks)
Similarly, when Chechnyan terrorists took hostages at a school in Russia, leading to hundreds of deaths--these proud warriors for the higher morality of the Koran raped many of the children. (See also here.)
In the tape, bin Laden singles out Australia and other U.S. allies as an enemy of Muslims and says al Qaeda had warned Australia over its involvement in East Timor and Afghanistan.
Of course, rape is a fundamental part of the process by which Sudanese militias--who al-Qaeda praises--commit the crimes of Darfur.
As this article from the September 24, 2004 Front Page points out:What does rape, then, have to do with these religious conflicts? Unfortunately, everything. The Islamic legal manual ‘Umdat al-Salik, which carries the endorsement of Al-Azhar University, the most respected authority in Sunni Islam, stipulates: “When a child or a woman is taken captive, they become slaves by the fact of capture, and the woman’s previous marriage is immediately annulled.” Why? So that they are free to become the concubines of their captors. The Qur’an permits Muslim men to have intercourse with their wives and their slave girls: “Forbidden to you are ... married women, except those whom you own as slaves” (Sura 4:23-24).
Something that isn't widely known in the West (because it might present a poor picture of Islam) is that a number of Islamic countries use the Koranic standard for rape convictions: there must be four eyewitnesses to a rape confirming the victim's account. If she can't produce four eyewitnesses at trial, she is convicted of prostitution. For practical purposes, this makes rape legal. How would there be four eyewitnesses to a rape who didn't stop it, unless they were participants? This is the law in Iran, and attempts to reform this law in Pakistan are being fought by--who else?--the Islamist parties that are allies of al-Qaeda. The only reference I could find was at the bottom of this other story from November 13, 2006 Reuters:
After one successful battle, Muhammad tells his men, “Go and take any slave girl.” He took one for himself also. After the notorious massacre of the Jewish Qurayzah tribe, he did it again. According to his earliest biographer, Ibn Ishaq, Muhammad “went out to the market of Medina (which is still its market today) and dug trenches in it. Then he sent for [the men of Banu Qurayza] and struck off their heads in those trenches as they were brought out to him in batches.” After killing “600 or 700 in all, though some put the figure as high as 800 or 900,” the Prophet of Islam took one of the widows he had just made, Rayhana bint Amr, as another concubine.
Emerging victorious in another battle, according to a generally accepted Islamic tradition, Muhammad’s men present him with an ethical question: “We took women captives, and we wanted to do ‘azl [coitus interruptus] with them.” Muhammad told them: “It is better that you should not do it, for Allah has written whom He is going to create till the Day of Resurrection.’” When Muhammad says “it is better that you should not do it,” he’s referring to coitus interruptus, not to raping their captives. He takes that for granted. Supporters of opposition Islamic alliance Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal (MMA) hold placards during a rally in Multan November 28, 2006. The rally was held to protest against amendments to Pakistan's Islamic laws that will allow rape victims to seek justice without the need for four male witnesses while alliance leaders have threatened to resign from the parliament saying amendments are un-Islamic.
Not surprisingly, this ugly little detail isn't getting much attention, because the left wants to imagine that al-Qaeda and friends are on the same side, since the left and al-Qaeda have the same enemy: George Bush.
Identity Theft & Background Checks
A reader pointed me to this worrisome hole in the national firearms background check system. Remember the four police officers shot in Florida a few days ago? From September 14, 2007 channel 4 in Jacksonville, Florida:First reports were that the person responsible for the shootings was a man named Kevin Wehner, a Jacksonville resident with no criminal record.
It turns out that Labeet used Wehner's stolen identity for more than registering cars. From the September 15, 2007 South Florida Sun-Sentinel:
"Wehner is not involved in this case," O'Brien said. "It appears to us that Labeet may have obtained identification, maybe a driver's license, in Wehner's name. We are trying to clarify that now."
Alvarez said it was Labeet's girlfriend who was apprehended at the scene that gave police wrong information.
"She told us his name was Kevin Wehner," said Alvarez, who stated that the first hours of any investigation are crucial and that the woman's statement hampered the investigation. She faces charges.
Wehner went to the Jacksonville Sheriff's Office when he saw his photo and heard his name used in connection with the Miami shooting. Late Thursday, JSO issued a statement saying it and the Florida Department of Law Enforcement "are confident that Mr. Wehner is not involved in the Miami incident today."
Authorities said Wehner reported being a victim of identity theft in October 2006 after he received three automobile registrations from the Miami-Dade County automobile tag agency for two vehicles he did not own. The JSO investigated the incident and discovered that an unknown person was identifying himself as Kevin Foston Wehner, using the victim's date of birth and Social Security number.Long before Shawn Labeet took the life of a Miami-Dade police officer, he stole a Jacksonville man's identity, used the alias to buy an arsenal of weapons, and disappeared into the South Florida landscape despite having an outstanding warrant on charges of shooting and injuring his girlfriend, officials said Friday.
My first thought is: shouldn't identity thefts be reported the national firearms background check system? Wehner had a clean record; that's why Labeet, using Wehner's identity, didn't get flagged when buying guns. Maybe it is time for the national background check system to get identity theft reports as well. It may be a little more complex for the victim of identity theft to buy a gun--but it would also slow down guys like Labeet, who were wanted.
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According to the uncle of the real Kevin Wehner, Wehner's wallet was stolen four years ago while he was vacationing in the U.S. Virgin Islands, where Labeet is from. Wehner reported the missing wallet to authorities there, and then identity theft to Florida police when he began getting notices in the mail about cars he never bought, said his uncle, John Wehner of Brooklyn, N.Y.
Between December 2005 and March 2006, Labeet bought nine guns, six assault rifles and three pistols, under the alias, said Miami-Dade police spokeswoman Linda O'Brien.
Another Cute Rube Goldberg Device
Although I'm not all that sure that this one really works as shown.
One odd aspect of this: it's a Honda ad from the United Kindgdom--but why is the announcer an American? Is this common in Britain, to use an American announcer?
UPDATE: Amazingly enough, according to Snopes.com, this was not computer graphics--it was real. Even the part that seemed most unlikely to me was done with a weight inside each of the tires, so that when the tire moved, the weight moved as well, causing the upward motion on the ramp.
Not Good News In One Sense
But maybe okay news for the likely consequences. From the September 19, 2007 Financial Times:Fresh economic shocks on the scale of the current credit squeeze will occur if US house prices continue to fall, one of the country’s leading housing experts warned on Wednesday.
Now, before you start hyperventilating, keep in mind that this is one of those, "if nothing happens" scenarios. Do you remember when the Fed kept raising interest rates in the 1990s to deal with what Alan Greenspan called "excessive exuberance"? Well, each time the Fed raised interest rates, they managed to inject a little reality into the stock market.
Robert Shiller, a Yale university economist, told a US congressional panel that he feared “the collapse of home prices might turn out to be the most severe since the Great Depression”.
“The decline in house prices stands to create future dislocations, like the credit crisis we have just seen,” he told the Senate’s joint economic committee.
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Mr Shiller, who designed the respected Case-Shiller house price index and predicted the bursting of the dotcom bubble in a bestselling book, said that while there had been a focus “on lax and irresponsible lending standards, I believe that this loss in housing value is the major ultimate reason we see a crisis today.”
Alan Greenspan, former Federal Reserve chairman, told the Financial Times this week that double-digit falls in house prices from their peaks would not be surprising. A fall in house prices on that scale would be unprecedented in US history and would have an economic cost several times greater than the meltdown in the subprime mortgage market that triggered the current financial crisis.
The Center for Responsible Lending has predicted that foreclosures on subprime loans will lead to a cumulative loss of $164bn (€118bn, £82bn) in home equity. Investment banks have suggested the costs to financial institutions could be more than $300bn.
I suspect that Tuesday's 1/2 point drop in interest rates--larger than many analysts expected--was the first of several such efforts by the Fed to deal with "unnecessary gloom." The reason is simple: if you want to lift housing prices, dropping interest rates will do it. The good inflation numbers gave the Fed the room to drop interest rates. The gloom of falling housing prices has really negative effects on the rest of the economy, such as construction and appliance sales. Falling housing prices also interfere with people using their house equity to buy really important necessities like vacations to Hawaii, speedboats, breast implants, and Jumbotrons for the living room. My guess is that as long as there's some risk of these worrisome housing price drops, the Fed will keep cutting interest rates.
Hint: this is probably not the time to lock in a 30 year fixed mortgage. I am expecting to see continued cuts in interest rates--maybe another 1/2 point, maybe another full point. And that should get the housing prices to stabilize, maybe even start to rise, and put the breast implant surgeons and Jumbotron salesmen back in business.
Why The Right of Conscience Is At Risk
We've had a long history in the U.S. of struggling over the question of what constitutes the right of individuals to disagree. Thomas Jefferson's famous saying that:The error seems not sufficiently eradicated that the operations of the mind as well as the acts of the body are subject to the coercion of the laws. But our rulers can have authority over such natural rights only as we have submitted to them. The rights of conscience we never submitted, we could not submit. We are answerable for them to our God. The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.
applies to this case, where homosexuals are intent on forcing their will on those who do not agree. From the September 18, 2007 New York Times:A boardwalk pavilion in the seaside town of Ocean Grove, N.J., that has been at the center of a battle over gay civil union ceremonies has lost its tax-exempt status because the state ruled it no longer met the requirements as a place open to all members of the public.
Imagine if, during the 1960s, the U.S. government had revoked the tax exempt status of the Mennonite or Quaker Churches because they were morally opposed to war, and refused to allow military recruiters into their churches. Here is an example of a group (and United Methodists are a very, very liberal denomination) that has a moral objection to homosexuality that is being blackmailed into smiling and pretending that everything is okay.
In a letter to the administrator of the Ocean Grove Camp Meeting Association, a Methodist organization that owns the pavilion property, the state commissioner of environmental protection, Lisa Jackson, declined to recertify the pavilion as eligible for a real estate tax exemption it has enjoyed since 1989 under the state’s Green Acres Program, but did renew the tax-exempt status of the rest of the boardwalk and the beach, also owned by the association.
The issue arose after the association, which has owned the land, the beach and 1,000 feet of the sea itself since 1870, rejected the requests of two lesbian couples to have their civil union ceremonies at the Boardwalk Pavilion.
The couples complained to the State Division on Civil Rights, which began a discrimination investigation. The association sued the state, claiming that the investigation violated its First Amendment rights because civil unions were contrary to the beliefs of the United Methodist Church.
It is for this reason, and because it violates federalism, that I oppose the Employment Non-Discrimination Act that is currently before Congress. It seeks to add sexual orientation to the list of protected groups under federal law. At least the version that I have seen is unlikely to impair the right of conscience--but if there is any lesson to be learned from watching the very creative laws demanding the courts impose same-sex marriage around the country, it is that homosexual activists will take any opportunity to twist the laws far and above what they were intended to do. Why make it easier for them by passing ENDA?
If you live in Idaho, you need to email Rep. Mike Simpson and let him know that ENDA needs to come to an end, and to vote no on it.
Will The Remaining Non-Corrupt Members of Our Government Please Raise Your Hands?
An investigation into the actions of someone who apparently bribed Rep Cunningham (R-CA) has subpoenaed records of 13 other members of Congress--who are refusing to comply:Acting on advice of the House general counsel, all 13 members of Congress who have been subpoenaed for documents and testimony by the lawyer for a man accused of bribing jailed former Congressman Rep. Duke Cunningham will refuse to comply.
Four Democrats, nine Republicans--about what I would expect, considering Republicans were in the majority, and therefore chairs of various committees and subcommittees (where it really helps most to have a good friend when contracts are being disbursed).
The subpoenas were issued for "documents and testimony" by the lawyer for Brent Wilkes, a defense contractor named in Cunningham's case. Cunningham pled guilty and is serving eight years in prison.
Five lawmakers received subpoenas for documents and testimony: House Armed Services Chairman Ike Skelton (D-MO), House Intelligence Chairman Silvestre Reyes (D-TX); Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-CA); House Defense Appropriations Chairman John Murtha (D-PA); and ranking House Appropriations Republican Jerry Lewis (R-CA).
Other members were served subpoenas requesting only testimony.
Among them were: House Minority Whip Roy Blunt (R-MO), erstwhile House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-IL), Rep. Joe Knollenberg (R-MI), Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R-MI); Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA), Rep John Doolittle (R-CA), Rep. Jerry Weller (R-IL), and Rep. Norm Dicks (D-WA).
Of course, this is relatively minor compared to the big scandal--one that is beginning to dwarf the Jack Abramoff scandal. From the September 20, 2007 Bloomberg.com:Democratic fundraiser Norman Hsu was charged with defrauding investors of $60 million in ``a massive Ponzi scheme'' and violating the federal campaign-finance law.
You know, I think someone could make that an important campaign slogan in the coming election, something like:
Federal prosecutors in New York filed a criminal complaint against Hsu, 56, today, accusing him of wire, mail and election fraud. Hsu also pressured investors to contribute to political candidates he favored, U.S. prosecutors said.
As managing director of Components Ltd. and Next Components Ltd., Hsu recruited investors by promising high returns on short- term investments, using money from new victims to pay off older ones, prosecutors said. Threatening to drop them, he forced clients to contribute ``tens of thousands of dollars'' to U.S. presidential and congressional candidates, prosecutors said.
``This case is about self-promotion and greed,'' U.S. Attorney Michael Garcia said at a press conference today in Manhattan. ``Hsu perpetrated a massive Ponzi scheme to support his lavish life style and in the process stole tens of millions of dollars from unsuspecting investors.''
Hsu is being held by Colorado authorities on separate charges stemming from a 1991 case. In that incident, he entered a no-contest plea to grand theft after being charged with stealing $1 million from 20 investors in a scheme to buy and resell latex gloves that didn't exist.
Hsu failed to appear for sentencing in that case, and spent more than 15 years as a fugitive. He became a Democratic fundraiser and contributor, giving hundreds of thousands of dollars to candidates and party committees, including U.S. Senator Hillary Clinton, a Democrat from New York, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a Washington-based research group.
Federal Election Crime
Hsu also violated federal election laws by making more than $20,000 in political contributions to two unnamed federal candidates in the names of others, prosecutors said. We pledge to make this the most honest, ethical, and open Congress in history.
There's just one problem: Nancy Pelosi's friends in the Democratic Party, people like Hillary Clinton, are at the core of this corruption. It doesn't do any good to say, "We're no more corrupt than Republicans," when it doesn't appear to be even close to true. But more importantly, Republican corruption seems to be at least American, red-white-and-blue corruption (just about money and unfair contract awards)--and not tainted with serious suspicions that the Chinese government has bought a big part of the Democratic Party.
The Horror! The Horror! Free Market Capitalism!
From the September 20, 2007 Inside Higher Education:Supporters describe it as a fund created by alumni to support interests they have at the university, in this case the study of Western civilization and free market economics.
Almost? No, I'm afraid that it is way beyond "almost a disdain."
But many professors see it as much more — as a move by conservative alumni with influential national support to bypass normal faculty governance, create new courses and impose ideological tests on who gets certain pots of money. The alumni who have given the money for the effort, currently housed at the university’s foundation, are explicit that they want a formal role in who gets money from the fund, the views those people should have, and the eventual goal of creating a new version of the Hoover Institution at a top public university, with the ambition of inspiring others to follow their model.
As a result of those statements and other concerns, professors at the university are debating whether the new academy is appropriate for the university. Some like the program, others think it could work with certain oversight provisions, and others find the entire idea questionable. With the program about to kick off formal activities and the Senate at the university preparing to vote on oversight proposals for the academy, the debate is heating up. And the debate comes at a time that critics of academe are increasingly embracing a model of creating free-standing centers to sponsor fellowships, courses, lectures and other activities around such themes as American history, Western civilization, and free markets.
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Vermette, a businessman and investor who is a former president of the university’s alumni association, said that the program came out of the conviction that key ideas are lost on too many students, and that money coming into higher education doesn’t change that. “I just have been concerned that the young people in particular are not being exposed to the value of free market capitalism and also limited government at our great universities,” he said. “There is almost a disdain for the free market.”The new program will sponsor educational programs (the development of new courses or new curriculum for courses), lectures, conferences, research and more. The programs will all be based on “free market capitalism,” Vermette said, citing the ideas of Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand and the Austrian economics school of such libertarian thinkers at Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek. Vermette said that the founders of the center “very much want to work with faculty” at Illinois to support these programs. “We’ll work within the system,” he said.
The left is upset because the values that they are trying to promote might not survive a serious academic challenge--and there's little or no chance of that in most public universities today.
Vermette stressed that the founders weren’t trying to exclude professors, but he also said that the donors anticipated having a real role in determining who gets support through the fund. Faculty members, he said, “will help us decide what programs are acceptable.” If professors at the university don’t want to get involved, he said, “we’ll bring in adjunct faculty when we need to,” he added.
Where Immoral Behavior Takes You
I almost feel sorry for the guy. Doubtless, he didn't think that what he was doing would become publicly known. Doubtless, he thought that what he was doing was his business, and no one else's. And I'm sure that he is now filled with shame about what happened, and upset because his career is in shambles, with no one to defend him. If only Michael Vick had solicited sex in a men's room, instead of organizing dogfights!
It says quite a bit about how rapidly the definition of "immoral" has changed in our society that Michael Vick probably wishes that he and Senator Larry "Happy Feet" Craig could change places.
Ohio's Concealed Carry Law
The Ohio Attorney General's office has a very good booklet explaining their concealed carry law, along with a discussion of the legal limits of use of deadly force here. I am pleased to see that the requirement that concealed carry licensees could only drive with the gun exposed have been dropped. I am also pleased to see that Ohio and Idaho have signed a reciprocity agreement. (I'm headed to Ohio next month.)
It's also kind of cool that there's an M1911 on the cover of that booklet!
Gun Control Advocates Prescribe A New Model
This appears to be from a University of Pennsylvania publication, the September 7, 2007 Gazette. First they explain that gun control has become something of a dead end politically:“This society has chosen to live with guns,” Dr. William Schwab was saying in July, as he stood before a roomful of reporters in a Penn Law classroom. “There are over 220 million guns in circulation in the United States of America. There is nothing that’s going to take those guns away.”
It starts off well, discussing that the problem of gun violence is related to the culture:
Schwab, a professor of surgery and the chief of traumatology and surgical critical care at the University of Pennsylvania Health System, is intimate with the consequences of that number. Over the past decade, he and his surgical team have treated over 3,000 gunshot wounds—and that’s only a fraction of Philadelphia’s total.
“This city in the last year has had 2,000 people admitted to its trauma centers for gunshot wounds,” he went on. “What’s interesting is that if you do the numbers and you believe the FBI, only 11 percent of bullets ever strike the person they’re aimed at … Just do the multiplier there, and you’ll say that we had people shooting at each other 20,000 times this year. This is a phenomenal epidemic and something that has to be dealt with.”
If that sounds like the wind-up for a proposal to gut the Second Amendment, get ready for a curveball. Because Schwab isn’t really interested in “gun control,” which, after all, is right up there with abortion and gay marriage atop the list of issues that most polarize the American electorate. What he wants is to reduce gun violence and the impact it has on its victims. And like the other half-dozen panelists at this media seminar, Schwab has concluded that talking about firearm bans is a dead end in that quest.Of course, the environments in which most gun homicides take place are typically urban and poor. A high proportion of the young men in such neighborhoods are unemployed, giving them ample leisure time to become involved in contests of honor and personal disputes. And there is evidence to suggest that gun ownership is attractive even to law-abiding citizens in such areas, who may reason that police protection is an insufficient guarantor of their safety. It doesn’t take much imagination to see how this feedback loop can take on the contour of an arms race.
At this point, I was hoping to see some serious discussion of what can be done to solve the unemployment problem, or deal with the honor culture that drives much of the violence.
No, the solution is a police state:High gun density is a good predictor of elevated gun violence, according to Dr. Lawrence Sherman, director of the Jerry Lee Center of Criminology and professor of sociology at Penn. But there’s also a substantial level of spontaneity in gun-mediated arguments, he added, and the large majority of disputes don’t last long enough to allow someone without a firearm to go home and fetch one.
Why is it so painful to look at the economic and cultural problems that are driving this that these doubtless very liberal academics would rather authorize the police to stop and frisk everyone walking down the street?
“The rule seems to be that if you don’t have the gun at the point of time you’re confronting somebody and you’re angry at them, you’re much less likely to end up killing them,” Sherman said.
One challenge, therefore, is finding a way to reduce the level of gun-carrying in public, where most of these homicides happen.
This idea played a role in Philadelphia’s Democratic mayoral primary campaign, during which eventual winner Michael Nutter W’79 proposed expanding the police’s ability to stop and frisk people on the streets. Sherman presented several experimental studies indicating that such a policy can be very effective at reducing gun violence—even, somewhat surprisingly, if there’s no increase in the number of guns seized.
“There’s kind of two different models,” he said. The first is “the idea of a ‘take-away’ model, where the more guns seized, the less guns are carried. But I think what’s really working is a ‘keep-away’ model. That is, if you are deterred from carrying your gun into an area where police might take it away from you, you don’t want lose it, even for the week or two it takes to replace it, because somebody might hear that the cops took your gun, and they might come after you because you’re unarmed.”
In other words, a policing tactic that has stood up to Supreme Court scrutiny in the past, if applied without racial bias, might work without changing the laws regulating gun ownership. In a sense, the goal would be to bring city streets closer in line with airports and courtrooms, from which guns have been successfully excluded.
The International Association of Chiefs of Police
This item by Dave Hardy at Of Arms and the Law makes it sound as though the Joyce Foundation just bought the IACP:A while back, the antigun Joyce Foundation made a hefty grant to fund a gun summit meeting by some members of the International Assn of Chiefs of Police. Here's the pdf file.
My recollection, however, is that the IACP has long been on the gun ban bandwagon. Maybe it isn't so much that the Joyce Foundation bought the IACP, as that the Joyce Foundation funded an event by a group that already believed the same way.
Surprise! It concludes we need lots and lots of gun control. Ban "assault weapons," repeal the Tihart Amendment, ban .50 BMG, outlaw possession by anyone with a violent misdemeanor record, ban armor piercing using a standard of actual ability to penetrate body armor (which would encompass virtually any rifle round), outlaw private gun transfers, increase ATF's budget, etc., etc.
But the interesting part is that the International apparently let Joyce staffers write the report:
"We are grateful to several key staff at the Joyce Foundation; President Ellen Alberding for her leadership, passionate concern for quality of life in our communities, and particularly for her interest in partnering with the IACP to address gun violence, Program Officer Roseanna Ander for her dedication to reducing gun violence in the Great Lake States and the nation, and her relentless enthusiasm as she worked with IACP staff to make the summit a reality and Communications Director Mary O’Connell, who has aided in highlighting and supporting the vision of our summit participants through her editing, writing and consistent work to produce this report. "
Giuliani Sure Has Chutzpah
From the September 20, 2007 Washington Post:Rudolph W. Giuliani will go before the rank and file of the National Rifle Association on Friday, seeking support for his Republican presidential campaign from a group he once likened to "extremists" for its efforts to repeal the ban on assault weapons.
My guess is that the reason Giuliani has been getting a pass from NRA leadership is:
But even as the former New York mayor strives to burnish his Second Amendment credentials at the gathering in Washington, a panel of federal judges in his home town will be hearing arguments on the lawsuit that Giuliani filed seven years ago aimed at punishing the nation's gun manufacturers for violent crimes involving firearms.
Announcing the lawsuit in 2000, then-Mayor Giuliani wrote in his weekly column about issues facing the city that "this is an industry which profits from the suffering of innocent people. The lawsuit is intended to end the free pass that the gun industry has enjoyed for a very long time, which has resulted in too many avoidable deaths."
He called the lawsuit "an aggressive step towards restoring accountability to an industry that profits from the suffering of others." The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit will decide whether the lawsuit -- against Colt, Glock, Smith & Wesson and others -- can move forward despite federal legislation that attempted to grant immunity to the companies.
A spokeswoman for Giuliani's presidential campaign yesterday declined to say whether he still supports the lawsuit or the goals he laid out in 2000.
1. They perceive him as someone that can defeat Clinton in the general election.
2. He's not a social conservative. I get the impression from who NRA leadership favors that they are libertarian, not conservative.
Maybe Giuliani has really changed his mind on this. But call me skeptical.
What Makes Canadian Health Care Work?
The same thing that makes their tiny military spending possible--living next door to the United States. From September 14, 2007 Canadian Television:Liberal MP Belinda Stronach, who is battling breast cancer, travelled to California last June for an operation that was recommended as part of her treatment, says a report.
I know that this isn't that unusual for ordinary Canadians. I blogged a few weeks back about a mother who was about to give birth in Calgary--and had to be flown to Great Falls, Montana, because there weren't enough neonatal ICU beds available in one hospital in all of Canada. It makes you wonder: could the Canadian system that Michael Moore thinks so highly of work if Canada was in Australia, and they didn't have a less fair but overall better health care system available an hour's flight away?
Stronach's spokesman, Greg MacEachern, told the Toronto Star that the MP for Newmarket-Aurora had a "later-stage" operation in the U.S. after a Toronto doctor referred her.
"Belinda had one of her later-stage operations in California, after referral from her personal physicians in Toronto. Prior to this, Belinda had surgery and treatment in Toronto, and continues to receive follow-up treatment there," said MacEachern.
He said speed was not the reason why she went to California.
Instead, MacEachern said the decision was made because the U.S. hospital was the best place to have it done due to the type of surgery required.
Stronach was diagnosed last spring with ductal carcinoma in situ (DCIS). The cancer is one of the more treatable forms but Stronach still required a mastectomy -- which was done in Toronto -- and breast reconstruction.
Stronach, who announced last April she would be leaving politics before the next election, paid for the surgery in the U.S., reports the Star.
"As we said back in June when we confirmed the surgery, this is a personal and private matter between Belinda, her family and her physicians. I think you'll understand that because of respect for Belinda's privacy, we refrained from offering specific details around her medical treatment," said MacEachern.
While it is rare for MPs to seek treatment outside Canada, MacEachern said Stronach was not lacking confidence in the system.
"In fact, Belinda thinks very highly of the Canadian health-care system, and uses it when needed for herself and her children, as do all Canadians. As well, her family has clearly demonstrated that support," MacEachern told the Star.
Some of the comments on the Canadian Television story from Canadians are very revealing. A lot of the liberals are basically saying that it is an invasion of Stronach's privacy to discuss what seems to be a failure of the Canadian health care system. Other comments by Canadians reveal some deep disgust with what is going on:If I had her money, I'd receive my primary care in the States too. We have been saddled with a Stalinist, second-rate system.
and:
The best physicians and the best equipment are in the U.S.I had cancer and am now 'cured'... and thankful for the treatment I received in Toronto.
and:
But going through the system here in Canada is quite the ordeal; no treatment for the 'whole person.'
Perhaps having had a taste of this, Ms. Stronach decided to go elsewhere, and hopefully will present some ideas for improvements when she returns to public life.Sure she should get her treatment where she can if she is able to pay for it.
and:
The story here isn't about those who get treatment in the states. It's about a liberal politician that is part of a political party that espoused the Canadian public system and vowed to ensure that no private health care was ever going to uspurp the current system. She is an MP for the party that relentlessly attacked the conservatives for their "hidden agenda" to privatize health care.
The irony and hypocracy is the story here. The rich get health care, the rest of use wait in line. All because of liberal fearmongering that does not allow for a real debate on the state of the health care system in Canada.9,000 Canadian-trained doctors in the US. Why should we be surprised if some of the patients head there too? It's time for the Liberal Party to acknowledge the gorilla at the dinner table and work with the Conservatives in a non-partisan way to start thinking about fundamental changes to our health care system. This means either raising taxes to Scandinavian levels, or openly allowing privatization instead of operating in the shadows and slowly cutting services one a a time. Let the NDP scream about zero compromise on socialized medicine, time for the mainstream parties to get a grip on this.
and:While living in the USA several years ago I found a lump in my breast. I went to the doctor the next day, she had me in for a ultrasound and mam the very next day. We are now living in Canada again, this time my doctor here found a lump, she sent me to a specialist ( 10 1/2 weeks it took), still haven't had a mam. This Canadian system is scary, and needs to be fixed! I too if I had the money would seek treatment in the USA.
Something that doesn't get discussed enough in the debate about universal health care is that the cost of health care is huge. Yes, there are some efficiencies that having everyone insured will bring to the table. If we are prepared to accept the Big Brother approach of John Edwards of forced preventative health care, we can probably save a bit more money. If we are prepared to accept doctors telling us we have to eat healthy, can't smoke, can't drink to excess, how and with whom to have sex, and how much exercise to get, we can probably save a lot of money. But not only will most Americans balk at this level of government intrusion, I'm sure the ACLU would file suit the instant that the federal health care nazis started to wag their fingers about unprotected casual sex (just homophobia, is what they will say).
If we can't make a big difference in the costs--and I don't think we can--then we have the face up to the fact that medical care for everyone at the level that most Americans have come to expect is very, very expensive. Canada has opted to go cheap, rather than raise taxes to the level required to provide American levels of medical care. Will Americans be willing to raise taxes enough to provide medical care for the uninsured? If those caring and compassionate Canadians won't, why would we expect that Americans will?
HilaryCare 2.0
Senator Clinton has unveiled her new universal health insurance plan--and I must say, it's progress from the disaster she tried to impose in 1993. Of course, there wasn't much direction but up from that.
Part of the improvement is that she won't require everyone to give up their current health insurance plan. The goal is to only cover the uninsured, by giving them the option of joining the current federal health plan for Congresscritters.
The downside is that it will require $110 billion in subsidies, supposedly by raising taxes on those who make more than $250,000 a year. (Somehow, I suspect that it will drop down into my bracket along the way, since these are Senator Clinton's big supporters.)
The other downside is that it will force every American to buy health insurance. I think health insurance is a good idea--but I have acquaintances who are so obscenely rich that they really don't need health insurance. There is literally nothing bad that can happen to them, for any length of time, that would make a significant dent in their wealth. (Of course, they vote Democrat.) Clinton wants to eventually make this requirement to show health insurance a condition of employment:"At this point, we don't have anything punitive that we have proposed," the presidential candidate said in an interview with The Associated Press. "We're providing incentives and tax credits which we think will be very attractive to the vast majority of Americans."
And the current requirement for proof of legal residency here works so well! Groan.
She said she could envision a day when "you have to show proof to your employer that you're insured as a part of the job interview — like when your kid goes to school and has to show proof of vaccination," but said such details would be worked out through negotiations with Congress.
The leftist cheerleaders, like Joe Klein at Time, are already screaming when Drudge Report described this statement as "Health Insurance Proof Required for Work":I know this is old news, but this guy is shameless. The headline, with a photo of a three-quarters crazed Hillary, is HEALTH INSURANCE PROOF REQUIRED FOR WORK
So Hilary says that the long-term goal is requiring proof of health insurance for work. And to point this out is misleading or dishonest? In what way?
Maryland High Court Rules Against Same-Sex Marriage Suit
The Maryland Court of Appeals (which is Maryland's highest court) has ruled against a lawsuit that claimed that "one man, one woman" violates the Maryland Constitution's equal rights regardless of sex provision. To my surprise, the Court of Appeals examined the evidence from contemporary documents to demonstrate that (surprise, surprise) in 1972, there is simply no evidence that this provision was intended to give women a right to marry women. No surprise; if anyone had claimed that this was the purpose, and been taken seriously, it would have gone down to defeat. The objective of the clause was to prohibit discrimination against women as a class that gave them less legal rights than men--and incidentally, guaranteed the reverse as well--that men could not be given less legal rights than women.
I'm glad to see the Court of Appeals decision deals with the Loving case, in which the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a Virginia law that punished interracial marriages contracted elsewhere, pointing out that the Virginia law was intended to promote white racial superiority, as evidenced by how it only prohibited whites from marrying non-whites; blacks could marry Asians, for example, without breaking the law.
Most importantly, the Court of Appeals concluded that there was no fundamental right to marry members of the same sex, and that such a law only has to pass the rational basis standard of review.
Unfortunately, the Court of Appeals repeats the falsehoods of Lawrence v. Texas (2003) that For a significant period of American history, homosexual persons generally were not the object of regulatory focus because sexual and gender orientations differing from “traditional” sexual preferences were not well conceptualized by the public until after the Civil War.
This is clearly false--not even open to serious argument, since a number of Colonial statutes did specifically prohibit homosexual conduct. The concept certainly existed, even though the word itself did not. As an example, consider this New Haven statute published in a 1656 law book:
... [T]he “concept of the homosexual as a distinct category of person did not emerge until the late 19th century”.If any man lyeth with mankinde, as a man lyeth with a woman, both of them have Committed abomination, they both shall surely be put to death. Levit. 20. 13.
Driving State Highway 55 At 600 MPH
Have you ever wanted to travel up Idaho state highway 55 from Summit Ridge Road in Boise County to Valley County at 600 miles per hour? Click here. (It's about a 30 MB download--I wouldn't try this on dialup.)
I took this film on a clear blue day, but rather late in the afternoon. I was hoping that the sun angle would give me lots of very dramatic shadows--but mostly, it gave me direct sun in the lens when headed southwest, and great accentuated visible water spot stains when traveling south. I should either film when the sun is high in the sky, or when I am only driving away.
I toyed with the idea of putting up the higher resolution versions of this video, but they are like 370 MB and 555 MB. Nope! They look better (crisper), but unless you are watching this on a TV, it won't justify the download time.
Lerach Pleading Guilty
I mentioned early this year a federal criminal investigation that was leading to William Lerach, a prominent California lawyer who sues companies when their stock goes down--and not surprisingly, was good buddies with Democrats like Clinton. Now Lerach is pleading guilty:It took seven years, but L.A. federal prosecutors are finally on the verge of putting famed plaintiff lawyer William Lerach in federal prison.
Because Lerach is a criminal, he is also a large contributor to the Democratic Party--and John Edwards apparently has been doing his best to help Lerach. (You remember John Edwards, the candidate who talks a lot about the two Americas: the fatcats who are under criminal investigation and contribute to his campaign, and those of us who aren't.) Lerach is, of course a strong contributor to many Democrats, including Hilary Clinton, Joseph Biden, and the aforementioned John "$400 haircut" Edwards.
Several people briefed on the case said Monday that Lerach and the prosecutors had agreed on a binding deal in which Lerach's lawyers would ask for a sentence of 12 months and prosecutors would seek 24 months. If U.S. District Judge John Walter does not want to sentence Lerach within that range, the deal would be scuttled.
The agreement, said people familiar with the case, would have Lerach pay a fine of $8 million, and would get his former firm — now known as Coughlin Stoia Geller Rudman & Robbins — out from under the investigation.
Lerach announced late last month that he would be retiring. He left the firm on Aug. 29.
Lerach has been the target of L.A. federal prosecutors since 2000, when a Beverly Hills ophthalmologist aiming to lessen his prison sentence for insurance fraud told the government that he had been given illegal kickbacks by Lerach while serving as a lead plaintiff in securities class actions.
Steven Cooperman's information sparked a wide-ranging probe of Lerach and his former law firm, which is now known as Milberg Weiss. (Lerach split from that firm in 2004 to start San Diego-based Lerach Couglin Stoia Geller Rudman & Robbins.)
Mental Health Parity
There's a bill working its way through Congress to require private insurers to cover mental illness identically to physical illness. You can read the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill press release about it here.
I am very sympathetic to the motives of the backers of the bill. They want insurance companies to stop ducking the problem of mental illness--which doubtless plays some part in why a lot of mentally ill people end up homeless on the streets. But I am also not comfortable with the federal government telling insurance companies how to run this, and there are three reasons why.
Unnecessary Tying Of Hands
For a very long time, insurance companies paid vast sums of money out, without asking too many questions, for psychoanalysis. In the 1980s, the government threatened to "do something" if insurers didn't get rising medical care premiums under control. Well, they did. The insurers started doing cost-benefit analyses on various procedures and lengths of stay. They start pressuring hospitals to send new mothers home the day after, or in some cases, the day of delivery, based on evidence that longer stays weren't really needed. And then the same bunch of activists that whined about high medical costs started whining that the insurance companies were doing something about it.
Similarly, in the 1980s, insurance companies started noticing that the evidence for the effectiveness of psychoanalysis was missing. (And no surprise--psychoanalysis seems to be built on false premises.) So they started limiting what they would pay for--no more of paying for twice a week visits for years on end. I won't call psychoanalysis fraud--I think many of the psychiatrists who do it actually believe in what they are doing, and it probably does provide some benefit to some. But I'm a bit suspicious that more than a few doctors became psychiatrists so that they could be paid well without having to get blood and pus on their clothes. And now, psychiatry is no longer such a well-paid specialty.
I think there's a lot of merit to what non-psychoanalytic psychiatrists do, and I would like to see more insurance companies provide mental illness coverage. But I am a bit reluctant to tie insurers' hands with a law mandating this.
Federalism Issues
This particular bill originally preempted state laws on this subject, so that a state that already had a mental health parity law (as several do) might actually have that law wiped out by a federal law. In some cases, this could have reduced the mental illness coverage that some states currently mandate.
The bigger issue, however, is that as much as possible, laws need to be done at the state level. If something truly involves interstate matters (and some things clearly do), then the federal government has to take action. But it isn't clear to me that such laws necessarily need to operate at the federal level. I might oppose an individual state passing a particular law like this, but at least with 50 laboratories, there's a chance to see what works, and what doesn't. More importantly, 50 different states are likely to have 50 different circumstances. What might be necessary in one state might not be necessary in another.
Why Doesn't Medicare and Medicaid Have This Requirement?
Perhaps I am mistaken on this, but I believe that Medicare (and probably Medicaid) still treats mental illness in an inferior manner to physical illness. At least, that was the state of the law in 1965, when Congress created Medicare, and this statement from this year suggests that this hasn't been changed:As you know, Medicare has perhaps the out of date and discriminatory benefit for mental illness and substance abuse treatment of any public or private sector program. The most widely recognized restrictions are the discriminatory limit of 190 lifetime days on inpatient care under Part A and the 50% cost sharing requirement for outpatient services under Part B. These restrictions – which apply only to mental illness treatment – were unacceptable intolerable in 1965, and are even more troubling in 2007.
If this law forcing mental illness parity on private insurance companies is such a good idea--why is that Medicare doesn't have the same requirement imposed on it? At least if Congress forces Medicare to do this, they have the legal authority to do so, and no one would question that this is the case. But I see no reason why a private insurer should be forced to do something that the federal government won't force Medicare to do.
Fascism in America? Maybe I Was Wrong!
At least the video of an antiwar protester being dragged from a microphone and Tasered by the police looks real bad. What's even worse is that the person who answers his question--and ignores this fracas going in with the student screaming in pain--is John Kerry. RoboSenator seems to be either completely and utterly unaware of this amazing sequence of events taking place in front of him--or completely and utterly unconcerned about it. Either way, it doesn't say much for John Kerry.
UPDATE: Other accounts suggest that, like the Rodney King video, what happened before the tape started rolling makes this look a little less absurd. I am still not happy with the police using a Taser on this kid--they should have been able to manhandle him out of there--but it does look like the punk was doing his best to get arrested, grabbing a microphone from someone else, and refusing to give it up.
The War Protest The Media Doesn't Show You
Michelle Malkin has some video of the war protesters in Washington, DC. As you might expect, the language is coarse and vulgar. America, of course, is a fascist society. That's why all of these people will disappear into the federal gulag or be executed without trial before the week is over. (Oh, they won't?)
My father opposed the Vietnam War--and at a time when it wasn't a particularly popular stand. (He also seemed to think quite a lot of Ayn Rand, at a time when no one had even heard of her.) But I also recall that he thought the antiwar protesters were doing their cause great harm because of their countercultural baggage. In the case of the current crop of antiwar protesters--maybe that's a good thing.
As the saying goes, "Never offend with style when you can offend with substance."
Another Victory for Relativism
M. Simon over at Classical Values has an amusing post about how the relativists won the culture wars in the humanities--but there's a price they paid for it: Here comes the punch line. And on the first page too!
It rather reminds me of the deconstructionist literature professor who spends all day telling his students that the race, class, sex, and orientation of a writer and of the reader make it impossible to determine any absolute meaning in a text. The real meaning is impossible to separate from all those distractions. After class ends, he leaves a message on the home answering machine for his wife to order a pizza for dinner. All this reflects what the philosopher Martha Nussbaum today describes as a "loss of respect for the humanities as essential ingredients of democracy." Nussbaum, who panned Bloom's book in The New York Review in 1987, teaches at the University of Chicago, which like Columbia has retained a Western-based core curriculum requirement for undergraduates. But on some campuses, "the main area of conflict is trying to make sure that the humanities get adequate funding from the central administration," Nussbaum wrote in an e-mail message, adding, "Our nation, like most nations of the world, is devaluing the humanities vis-Ã -vis science and technology, so constant vigilance is required lest these disciplines be cut." Louis Menand, a Harvard English professor and New Yorker staff writer who serves on Harvard's curriculum reform committee, concurs: "The big question for humanists is, How do we explain why what we do is important for people who aren't humanists? That's been tough, really tough."
The Professor is complaining that the people think the Humanities have no relevance. If she is a liberal she should be cheering that moral relativism has won. If no judgments can be made no need to teach judgment, eh? I guess the downside of that bothers the Professor. Isn't it ironic, just a bit, don't ya think?
The professor's wife to herself: "What do you mean by 'pizza'? Is giving me orders about food simply part of the phallocentric patriarchal system of oppression? Maybe you are really telling me that I should be 'available' when you return home? Or is this just another reminder of who is in charge here?"
When the professor gets home: "No, I just wanted you to order a pizza, so we wouldn't have to cook dinner."
Since I'm Sure The Clarification Won't Be Distributed As Widely As The First Quote
From the September 17, 2007 Washington Post:
Need Some Cheap, Petty Laughs?Karl Marx Treatment Center presents the People's Cube
I'm sore from laughing! Make sure you peruse the "News we just don't have time to write about" column on the rigbt.
John Edwards proposes "single payer" trial lawyer insurance for all, mandatory pre-jurisprudence care
Larry "Happy Feet" Craig uses Michael Flatley's Riverdance defense
Nigeria's plan to nationalize local spam industry sparks massive riots in Lagos
The Obligations of the Christian Commonwealth
A regular reader expressed surprise at a recent posting by me that he read as supporting increased government spending--and he thought that this was the first time that I had ever done that.
First of all, I haven't been a reflexive anti-government spending person in many years. I supported the War on Terror--which has turned out to be really, really expensive (and might have been close to this expensive even if Bush had done it right). I have long supported increased government spending on basic research in the area of health, and the sciences. This doesn't mean that every grant makes sense--a lot of them don't--but some of the research that the government funds leads to basic understanding of mental illness, which is one of my pet concerns.
Secondly, the point of that posting was that if the government decides to increase spending to provide health insurance for the uninsured, there are smarter, more efficient ways to do it, and less smart, less efficient ways to do it. I'm a bit weird about this, but I generally think that if we decide we are going to do step X, let's find a cheaper, more efficient way to do step X.
Thirdly, I have for several years pointed out that part of the American tradition from the very beginning has been that this is a Christian commonwealth. There is a moral obligation that has been part of English law since at least the Elizabethan Poor Laws to provide at least some minimal level of assistance to those who are incapable of doing so themselves. As Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England points out:Life is the immediate gift of God, a right inherent by nature in every individual; and it begins in contemplation of law as soon as an infant is able to stir in the mother’s womb....
That doesn't mean that every poor person has a right to cable TV, a semi-private hospital room, a car, and steak every night. It also doesn't mean that those who can work, but won't, have a right to support.
The law not only regards life and member, and protects every man in the enjoyment of them, but also furnishes him with every thing necessary for their support. For there is no man so indigent or wretched, but he may demand a supply sufficient for all the necessities of life, from the more opulent part of the community, by means of several statutes enacted for the relief of the poor, of which in their proper places.
There can be legitimate argument about what the right level of support is. Liberals tend to be a lot more magnanimous than conservatives about what "the necessities of life" include. There can also be legitimate argument about whether a particular mechanism is the right method of providing that support. Some methods are more efficient than others; some methods introduce socially destructive side effects, as the destruction of black inner city civilization caused by the Great Society demonstrates. But this is a Christian Commonwealth. Left-wing politicians like to point that out when pushing for social spending, but like to forget about it when it comes time to march in the Gay Pride Parade. Conservatives sometimes forget this when the issue of social welfare comes up. Libertarians, at least, are consistent: they don't acknowledge any governmental obligation on either count--and they aren't going to be winning any national elections in the near future, either.
Resumption of the Cold War?
This wasn't an encouraging thing to hear. From September 6, 2007 Reuters:LONDON (Reuters) -The air force scrambled four Tornado warplanes on Thursday to intercept eight Russian long-range bombers, the Ministry of Defence said.
Those of us who grew up living under the shadow of nuclear war regarded the end of this insanity as a very positive thing. Unlike the Islamofascists, I never thought it was likely that either side would make a conscious decision to start such a war. Both sides recognized that, in the words often but erroneously attributed to Nikita Krushchev, "the living will envy the dead." But wars sometimes start by accident, or because one side is convinced the other side will back down rather than go to war. Putin is probably just sending a message with this. But what an incredibly stupid message. He needs to remember who it is that is killing Russians right now--and it is al-Qaeada's farm club in Chechnya, not the West.
The ministry said the Russian aircraft had not entered British air space.
"In the early hours of this morning four RAF (Royal Air Force) Tornado F3 aircraft from RAF Leeming and RAF Waddington (bases) were launched to intercept eight Russian Bear aircraft which had not entered UK air space," it said in a statement.
The Tupolev Tu-95, codenamed "Bear" by NATO, is Russia's equivalent of the U.S. B-52 bomber and is a Cold War icon.
Russia's defence ministry published a statement earlier on Thursday which said 14 Russian strategic bombers had started long-range routine patrol operations on Wednesday evening over the Pacific, the Atlantic and the Arctic.
Relations between London and Moscow are at their worst since the Cold War. Russia's refusal to extradite Andrei Lugovoy, a former KGB bodyguard suspected of murdering emigre Alexander Litvinenko in London last year, led to tit-for-tat expulsions of diplomats from both countries.
FRACTIOUS TIES
Ties between Russia and the European Union have also deteriorated of late over issues such as energy policy, Kosovo and Moscow's treatment of European firms operating there.
The Russian statement said six planes had already returned to base and the other eight were still in the air.
"The planes flew only over neutral water and did not approach the air space of a foreign state," the statement said. "Practically all the planes were accompanied by fighters from NATO countries."
Sky News said the Russian bombers were heading towards British air space and did a U-turn when approached by the British fighters. It is at least the second time in recent months Britain has scrambled jets to intercept Russian bombers.
The sorties by Russian bombers appeared to the latest of the regular long-range patrols that President Vladimir Putin announced last month would be resumed after a gap following the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Hampered by a shortage of fuel and airworthy planes, Russian bombers have for years been making only occasional patrols. But Putin said that starting on August 17, they would be in the air more or less constantly.
What Makes This Article Shocking Is Where It Appeared
The article is about how homosexuality doesn't appear to be a fixed trait, and that homosexuals can become straight. Not just act straight, not just control their urges, but actually become straight. And the article is in the August 27, 2007 Mother Jones! This is probably the most consistently hard left magazine that I have ever read:
....
One of the few people who knew that Aaron was gay showed him an article in Newsweek about a group offering "reparative therapy"—psychological treatment for people who want to become "ex-gay."
The article goes on to talk to gay activists who argue that admitting that they are capable of change is bad politics. It also gives a surprisingly fair presentation of the work of the National Association for the Research and Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH) and admits why the APA removed homosexuality from DSM-III:Freud was pessimistic that homosexuality could be treated, but doctors abhor an illness without a cure, and the 20th century saw therapists inflict the best of modern psychiatric practice on gay people, which included, in addition to interminable psychoanalysis and unproven medications, treatments that used electric shock to associate pain with same-sex attraction. These therapies were largely unsuccessful, and, particularly after the Stonewall riots of 1969—the clash between police and gays that initiated the modern gay rights movement—patients and psychiatrists alike started questioning whether homosexuality should be considered a mental illness at all. Gay activists, some of them psychiatrists, disrupted the annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association for three years in a row, until in 1973 a deal was brokered. The APA would delete homosexuality from its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) immediately, and furthermore it would add a new disease: sexual orientation disorder, in which a patient can't accept his or her sexual identity. The culprit in SOD was an oppressive society, and the cure for SOD was to help the gay patient overcome oppression and accept who he or she really was. (SOD has since been removed from the DSM.)
UPDATE: Eric at Classical Values comments about this article, and links to a YouTube video:
The APA cited various scientific papers in making its decision, but many members were convinced that the move was a dangerous corruption of science by politics. "If groups of people march and raise enough hell, they can change anything in time," one psychiatrist worried. "Will schizophrenia be next?" And their impression was confirmed when the final decision was made not in a laboratory but at the ballot box, where the membership voted by a six-point margin to authorize the APA to delete the diagnosis of homosexuality. It may be the first time in history that a disease was eliminated by the stroke of a pen. It was certainly the first time that psychiatrists determined that the cause of a mental illness was an intolerant society. And it was a crucial moment for gay people, at once getting the psychiatrists out of their bedrooms and giving the weight of science to Kertbeny and Ulrichs' claim that homosexuality was an identity, like race or national origin, that deserved protection.This video shows an effeminate gay man with a complaint I've heard before: "mainstream" straight-acting gays are intolerant of effeminate gays. (Which almost mimics the position of "straight society" that gays are effeminate and therefore repulsive.)
Warning: While Eric's posting is (as usual) completely worksafe and civilized, the YouTube video he links to is rather awash in a couple of the words that you can't say on television.
9/11 As A Failure of Understanding
A great column by Mark Steyn, well worth reading in full. From the September 16, 2007 Orange County Register:This year I marked the anniversary of Sept. 11 by driving through Massachusetts. It wasn't exactly planned that way, just the way things panned out. So, heading toward Boston, I tuned to Bay State radio talk-show colossus Howie Carr and heard him reading out portions from the official address to the 9/11 commemoration ceremony by Deval Patrick, who is apparently the governor of Massachusetts: 9/11, said Gov. Patrick, "was a mean and nasty and bitter attack on the United States."
Steyn goes on to point out the insanity of this, and observes that the reason that Islam is making such inroads into the West's most privileged youth:
"Mean and nasty"? He sounds like an oversensitive waiter complaining that John Kerry's sent back the aubergine coulis again. But evidently that's what passes for tough talk in Massachusetts these days – the shot heard around the world and so forth. Anyway, Gov. Patrick didn't want to leave the crowd with all that macho cowboy rhetoric ringing in their ears, so he moved on to the nub of his speech: 9/11, he continued, "was also a failure of human beings to understand each other, to learn to love each other."
I was laughing so much I lost control of the wheel, and the guy in the next lane had to swerve rather dramatically. He flipped me the Universal Symbol of Human Understanding. I certainly understood him, though I'm not sure I could learn to love him. Anyway, I drove on to Boston and pondered the governor's remarks. He had made them, after all, before an audience of 9/11 families: Six years ago, two of the four planes took off from Logan Airport, and so citizens of Massachusetts ranked very high among the toll of victims. Whether any of the family members present Tuesday were offended by Gov. Patrick, no one cried "Shame!" or walked out on the ceremony. Americans are generally respectful of their political eminences, no matter how little they deserve it.
We should beware anyone who seeks to explain 9/11 by using the words "each other": They posit a grubby equivalence between the perpetrator and the victim – that the "failure to understand" derives from the culpability of both parties.Fritz Gelowicz. Richard Reid. The Australian factory worker Jack Roche. The Toronto jihadists plotting to behead the Canadian prime minister. The son of the British Conservative Party official with the splendidly Wodehousian double-barreled name. All over the world there are young men raised in the "Multi-Kultur Haus" of the West who decide their highest ambition is to convert to Islam, become a jihadist and self-detonate.
The need to have a deeper purpose in life is very strong. For those who have raised their children with no deeper of a significance than materialism, and no deeper concept of truth than "Does it make you happy?" (the whole Marin County mentality that gave us John Walker Lindh), the Islamic statement of purpose fills that hole.
Why do radical imams seek to convert young Canadian, British and even American men and women in their late teens and twenties? Because they understand that when you raise a generation in the great wobbling blancmange of Deval Patrick-style cultural relativism – nothing is any better or any worse than anything else; if people are "mean and nasty" to us, it's only because we didn't sing enough Barney the Dinosaur songs at them – in such a world a certain percentage of its youth will have a great gaping hole where their sense of identity should be. And into that hole you can pour something fierce and primal and implacable.
Bizarre Craig's List Ads
You can always count on strange and odd stuff to show up on Craig's List, like this one that probably belongs in a very warped museum; and in the free category:partially eaten couch
Armed School Teachers
This is not a proud situation for America--but with the number of massacres, sometimes by mentally ill students, sometimes by mentally ill outsiders, and with the horrifying example of the Beslan Massacre by an al-Qaeda farm club, I think it is entirely appropriate that teachers have the option of being able to defend themselves and their students. What surprises me about this news story is the number of principals in Michigan who agree. From the September 12, 2007 Grand Rapids Press:
I won't argue with the special weapons training requirement. If a teacher is going to be armed as part of protecting the students, that's a bit higher standard of care than if she is armed to protect herself. The school is opening itself up to some risk by so doing, and if they want to make sure that the teacher is higher trained than the Michigan concealed carry statute requires, I can't argue the point too strongly.
Of course! Why, if we have weapons-free schools, no student or outsider will come on campus and start killing people! We have laws, policies, and procedures for that!
Why Real Campaign Finance Reform Is Impossible
John Lott has a piece in the New York Post today pointing out why news organizations are so keen on "campaign finance reform" that limits freedom:
This is an obvious campaign contribution. If any corporation not in the news business gave a contribution like this to MoveOn.org, it would be subject to all the limitations of federal law. Dr. Lott explains why, in practice, it will be impossible to make the New York Times obey the law on this, even though AT&T or IBM would be required to do so. This is why I have no confidence that real campaign finance reform is even possible--even if you could deal with these advertising discounts.
News media organizations simply because they are reporting news and running opinion pieces, can provide an immense amount of free publicity for a candidate. They can do enormous damage by how they choose to slant the news. Since the national news media are overwhelming on the side of the Democrats, this means that the Democrats get an enormous amount of free media support that Republicans don't get. The Supreme Court has decided (correctly) that the First Amendment's protection of freedom of the press means that a law requiring that newspapers print a candidate's response to a negative editorial was unconstitutional. The net effect is that news organizations enjoy an unlimited right to promote or denigrate political candidates.
Campaign finance "reform" measures such as McCain-Feingold limit freedom of speech by independent political committees in the 60 days before a general election--while explicitly protecting the right of news organizations to do as they wish. Other proposals seek to "level the playing field" by requiring Democrats and Republicans to spend equivalent amounts of money--and yet leave the news media free to continue their cheerleading on behalf of Democrats. This is hardly fair.
Redefining Success
I am inclined to believe that the ozone hole concerns were legitimate, even if later evidence suggests that it was more related to sunspot cycle. But Eric over at Classical Values points out that the definition of success for the ozone hole crowd is more related to laws passed than measurable progress on shrinking the Ozone Hole:We have succeeded in shrinking the hole that's growing
invention discovery in 1985, the Ozone Hole has been hovering malevolently over our sore earth's southernmost spot, and like a cosmic hemorrhoid, it causes the earth great pain -- right in the axis!
Greetings From Horseshoe Bend
We had a bit of a shower yesterday at sunset--and no, I don't think there were any leprechauns out there!
Click to enlarge
Click to enlarge
The Myth of the $435 Claw Hammer
In yesterday's post about Medicaid, I casually referred to the overpriced hammer bought by the Pentagon in the 1980s--and a reader set me straight, pointing out that this was an accounting artifact of distributing R&D costs for a very complex set of equipment equally over all materials used in that project. This overstated the R&D costs for the hammer (since there were none) and understated the R&D costs of the engine. I've updated yesterday's posting, and you can read an interesting article explaining how this myth was created here.
I knew that some of the claims made back then were, at best, misleading. For example, the $8000 coffee maker was pretty quickly revealed to be not a Mr. Coffee, but the kind of coffee maker that goes into an airliner--and which were only about 15% cheaper when the airlines bought it.
The Fashion Police Are Spreading
As I said a while back, when Atlanta was discussing a law against sagging pants, I applaud the intentions, but I don't see a way to write a law that can't be evaded. Still, there's some hope that discussion of these laws might lead adults to start cracking down on their kids about this--because that is the only domain where this problem has a ghost of chance of being fixed. From September 16, 2007 Associated Press:Cities Cracking Down on Saggy Pants
I Should Laugh At This...
William Saletan--who is sufficiently liberal to say that men training horses to have sex with them is closer to heterosexuality than homosexuality--does a good job of shredding a new "scientific study" that claims that liberal brains work better than conservative brains:
Saletan points out that the criteria used by the study are so artificial that they really don't tell us much about the real world:
Perhaps what this tells us is how rapidly people respond to data--but not how well they respond. The smartest person that I know isn't blindingly fast in conversation. He often takes what would seem like a very long time to convert his thoughts into speech. But it isn't because he's stupid, or slow. He's taking his time to put his thoughts into the correct form. Sometimes the choice is fast or accurate.
The fact that scientists think that they have come up with something meaningful based on this fairly laughable study tells me more about the scientists involved than about the science. I'm reminded of how otherwise respectable German scientists, after Hitler came to power, turned their Social Darwinist notions about ethnicity and genetics into Rassenkunde--"race science." A lot of this stuff made Social Darwinism look downright scientific and liberal.
Of course, the real question is why the masses continue to fund bad, politically motivated "science" like this. At least the Rassenkunde crowd was producing bad science to satisfy what was becoming a majority view in Germany of "Aryan superiority." This trash is just to make the liberal minority feel self-righteously superior.
Where Is Jeremiah?
The book of Jeremiah in the Old Testament recounts how Jeremiah rebukes Israel for its immorality in worshipping false gods (including child sacrifice), materialism, and oppressing the weak. I occasionally post examples of what I consider decline and fall of Western civilization. Sometimes the fact that the government is taking a positive action is itself an indication of how rapidly our society is declining into vulgarity. It is a pretty depressing sign of the times that you can read the intelligentsia defend bestiality by saying that it is just like being heterosexual. Or European political parties pursuing the legalization of incest.
Instapundit linked to this article in Marie Claire about the hot new cosmetic procedure which is so disturbing that I will not quote the article, or describe it. I can't even figure out a way to allude to it, because no rational person would even begin to imagine that anyone would think that this was necessary. It is, I am afraid, a sign of how completely hardcore pornography and specifically sodomy has taken over the definition of what makes a woman attractive.
I have flipped through more than a few of the magazines that my daughter read as a teenager, such as Marie Claire and Glamour, and I have noticed a self-refuting contrast between the articles and the ads. The articles emphasize that what matters in making a woman beautiful is what is on the inside. The ads emphasize that you need this makeup, these clothes, and by implication this body to get a man interested in you. I would like to believe the readership reads the articles, and is completely uninfluenced by the ads. But who's kidding whom?
I remember reading several years back a disturbing article about how the widespread watching of pornography, and the increasingly exposed pictures of male celebrities, were beginning to create widespread discomfort among teenaged males about their bodies--much like several generations of teenaged girls have grown up convinced that they were ugly because they didn't look like various actresses.
I weep for a country that has declined so rapidly that young women feel that the procedure described in that Marie Claire article is necessary for them to be optimally attractive. Perhaps if the feminists had spent a bit less time worrying about abortion, and a bit more time promoting the idea that women are people, not devices for men's sexual gratification, we wouldn't be in this absurd situation today.
Medicaid and Illegal Aliens; Medicaid and Nursing Care
The Center for Immigration Studies is an anti-illegal alien organization--and so this report about illegal alien use of Medicaid is quite surprising. For those that want to think that every every group against illegal immigration hates them and demonizes them, you will probably find the report a bit startling. Some of the summary remarks relative to Medicaid: • In 1996, 22 percent of immigrant-headed households used at least one major welfare program, compared to 15 percent of native households. After declining in the late 1990s, welfare use returned to 1996 levels by 2001, with 23 percent of immigrant households using welfare compared to 15 percent of native households. (Figure 1)
Table 1 shows the percentage of immigrants, broken into "all immigrants" and "legal immigrants" who receive some form of welfare: TANF; food stamps; or Medicaid. The rates of assistance for legal immigrants are higher than for natives. This doesn't surprise me a lot; many immigrants to America are refugees, often with little or no English skills, limited education, and sometimes pretty serious traumatic experiences before they arrived. But what is surprising is that there is very little difference in assistance rates between "all immigrants" and "legal immigrants." The illegals apparently use governmental assistance just a bit more than the legal immigrants.
• The persistently high rate of welfare use by immigrant households is almost entirely explained by their heavy reliance on Medicaid, use of which has actually risen modestly. In contrast, their use of TANF has fallen significantly, from a little under 6 percent in 1996 to slightly over 2 percent in 2001. Food stamp use has also declined significantly, from about 10 percent to 6 percent. These rates are now only modestly above those of natives. (Table 1)
• The decline in immigrant TANF and food stamp use has not resulted in a significant savings for taxpayers because it has been almost entirely offset by increases in the costs of providing Medicaid to immigrant households.
A regular reader points out something that tends not to get much discussed: a lot of elderly patients end up on Medicaid in end of life conditions, such as dementia. The reason is that it in many parts of the country, nursing care will run $5800 a month, and in some areas, $9000 a month. It doesn't take more than a few months for the average retiree to be broke enough that Medicaid comes into play.
He also points out that examining the bills for such nursing care leads to some pretty indefensible charges--like $360 for a three minute visit by a neurologist in a hospital who did nothing and $18 for a Tylenol tablet. Yeah, yeah, I know that there's some overhead involved, and some paperwork because a nurse has to go give the pill to a patient. But it does seem as though the $900 hammer crowd that used to work for the Pentagon is at work in the medical care system as well.
Perhaps instead of just increasing taxes to make a health insurance system for the uninsured, the left might want to consider if there's something that can be done to get the spending orgy under control first--and with the savings, use that to fund health insurance for the uninsured.
It is certainly the case that part of what is driving up the costs of our medical system is that it works a bit too well. There are an enormous number of people alive today who, in previous generations would never have made it to 50. I mentioned Dr. Andrew Weil's book Healthy Aging a while back. Weil made the point that more important than a long lifespan is a longer active healthy period of life. It does no good to add five years to a person's life, if those five years are spent hooked up to machines in a hospital bed. That's more like existence than life, and is it expensive, both to the individual, and to the society.
I think that most people share my view that it is better to live to 75, and go from active and healthy to dead in a couple of days, rather than living to 90, and spending the last five years of that life in severe discomfort, unable to do much but wait for nurses to change your diapers and give you sponge baths. (And that's one of the less unpleasant things that can happen to you at end of life.) That's why I think that medical research and medical care should be focused as much as possible on preventing health problems, rather than treating them once they develop.
UPDATE: A reader with experience working in military procurement points out that the $300 or $436 or $3000 hammer (depending on which of these accounts is correct) is an artifact of accounting practices no longer in use:The contractor simply allocated his overhead equally among all items on the contract, from engines to hammers, which was approved by the government (a practice since abandoned). Had the contractor allocated overhead to each item in accordance with its "actual" cost, the overall contract price would not have changed (or maybe it would have gone up to account for the time spent calculating each line items actual overhead).
Cute Pictures of Pets
If you haven't recently received one of those emails filled with pictures of cute pets doing adorable things--go here.
