Please tell me anything but the truth....

The Belmont Club: Business as usual

Change. It's what you've got left after filling up the tank at the gas station. But not something that is forthcoming in Washington, where the more thing change, the more they remain the same. George Will writes about energy supply and demand, and why it is objectively important but subjectively unimportant to anyone that matters.

Idiots...

The Human Rights Commission Jihad:

"...the BC Human Rights Commission has begun a similar case against Maclean's Magazine and the essayist Mark Steyn; while Ontario's Commission and the Federal body are considering additional actions. This is a result of a complaint by the Canadian Islamic Congress, who allege that the magazine and columnist are spreading “hatred and Islamophobia.” Do tell. Actually, one first rational reaction to this complaint might well be to wonder how ‘Islamophobia' can possibly exist – phobias are irrational fears; not concerns based on experience, observation and history."

Make his dream come true....

Accused 9-11 mastermind welcomes death penalty

Probably afraid to meet her in public...

Obama meets privately with Clinton

Where is Jimmy Carter?

Egypt deploys hundreds of policemen on Gaza border

Jonah Goldberg:

Messiah In Our Midst, The One, the Anointed

"At least I’m not in the wilderness this time. Lots of people have pondered the possibility that Barack is our Divine Redeemer. There are websites dedicated to the question “Is Barack Obama the Messiah?” Google that question and you’ll get more than 35,000 hits. Enter just the words “Messiah” and “Obama” and you’ll get nearly 10 times that.

But there’s more concrete evidence. Since Obama declared his candidacy, there have been remarkably few biblical plagues. And lions and lambs seem open to bilateral negotiations."

Read the whole thing, get a chuckle, and then get the Ipecac out.

The un-bitter Krugman...

Bits, Bands and Books, Paying for Creativity in a Digital World

It won't all happen immediately. But in the long run, we are all the Grateful Dead.

Well, well.... the cranky Mr. Krugman has paused his menopausal rants and said something constructive! Read it all and then wonder where all this intelligence has been for the past 7 years or so.... Even Andrew Samwick noticed.

What level playing field?

That All-Powerful "Lobby" You Hear So Much About

Sderot, population 23,000, is emblematic of the daily life and death struggle with which Israel has to contend. Over 7,000 rockets have been fired on the city in the years since Israel withdrew from the Gaza Strip, which the town borders. These attacks mainly come from Hamas, but are of course authored in Damascus and Tehran, which fund the organization committed to Israel's destruction (hey, so much for Sunnis never cooperating with Shia's, right?). I visited Sderot in March, and met with a woman who works with disabled children. Short drives around town, she said, can turn into hour-long ordeals with alarm sirens giving only 15 second warnings of incoming rockets. What country would put up with ceaseless, unprovoked missile attacks on its people? Can you imagine what the United States government would do if terrorists, finding safe haven in Mexico, launched rockets at retirement homes in southern Arizona?

The Belmont Club

Live in Fame or Go Down in Flames

Despite reports you may be reading elsewhere, this firing was not about nukes or missiles, well-placed sources say. "Far and away the biggest issue was the budget stuff, not the nuclear stuff. The UAV [unmanned aerial vehicle] fight, the F-22 deal... Gates really didn't appreciate it," one of those sources tells Danger Room. Now, with the botched missile and nuke shipments, "the SecDef [Secretary of Defense] has good cover to do something that suits him bureaucratically."

Let's hear it for civilian control of the military.

Farewell Free Speech....

Interview on Mark Steyn & Human Rights Tribunal

Getting rid of your inner wuss....

Peter Rabbit Must Die:

"The homeowner, a city-boy artist and illustrator who had moved to rural Pennsylvania, never wanted to kill the woodchucks. Sure, they were ruining the garden and digging up the foundations of outbuildings, but it was a moral issue: the artist, who is still so uncomfortable about what transpired — and so concerned about how his New York clients would feel about it that he is not willing to be identified — did not want to take a life."

This is a great piece, even though I find it hard to believe the Times gave it the full-page treatment.

Pretty good series... the best team won!

Red Wings 3, Penguins 2 - Penguins Raise Scare, but Red Wings Raise Cup

For a moment there, I thought that the Penguins might pull it off; but Detroit hung on last night and took the Cup.
If you look at the stats for the series (or if you watched the games), it is fairly safe to say that the Red Wings outplayed the Penguins by a wide margin; but Messrs. Crosby and Company kept coming back to life when you least expected it; and it made for some fabulous hockey along the way. The Wings certainly deserved this win, and Pittsburgh should be proud of the way they responded - if they can keep their team together for a year or two (very questionable since they have 7 players headed for free-agency) they should have some Sterling of their own.

Can't be.... Al Gore made a movie!!!

Army: Sun, Not Man, Is Causing Climate Change

You go girl!!!

Sisters Are Doing It For Themselves

Blowing themselves up, that is: Muslim Extremist Women Fight For Right To Join Al Qaeda.

Does anyone else remember Mark Rudd (SDS, Columbia, 1968) saying "The only place for women in the revolution is on their backs."

Lets be more like Europe...

Finnish Blogger Gets Two Years "Insensitivity Against Islam"

Finnish Court Serves Seppo Lehto Two Year Jail Sentence For Insensitivity Against Islam.......

Finland now stands on the brink of being one of Europe's foremost suppressors of free speech, with both the process and speed in which it has tackled Internet "political thought crimes" over the last year and a half, being nothing short of stunning.

If the Economy Is So Bad, Why Isn’t It Worse?:

"Given the high price of oil, the collapse of the dollar, and the credit crunch, one might have expected America to be mired in a deep recession. But it's not."

BRIGITTE BARDOT convicted of racism. So can we call all animal-rights activists racists, now?

Why whatever do you mean?

Double Standards, Hypocrisy, and Hey! A Trip to Bonn!

How about a carbon-offset tax on your next plane ticket?

And is there anything quite like having 2,400 delegates from 162 Nations all jetting in to Bonn, Germany for a summit on--you guessed it--Climate Change?

I can understand it is possibly more interesting/productive/eventful having everyone gathering in person, attending all those parties with all that food (yes, there's a bit of a food crisis going on about the world isn't there?), but has anybody heard of videoconferencing? There's this series of tubes called the Internets that allows for such things ...

A majority of the countries represented could attend virtually without any real loss in value, no?

One of the greatest hockey games I have ever seen...

Penguins 4, Red Wings 3 - Penguins Need 3 Overtimes, but They Keep Cup Series Alive

I seriously doubt that Pittsburgh will go on to win the cup, regardless of the emotional lift that this win might provide them. Detroits play last night was absolutely stifling; and I do not think that I have ever seen a team play as well. The Pens were quite lucky to tie the game up with 34 seconds left in regulation; but I was rooting for them to stretch the series.
The rest should be really interesting to watch......

lHow wrong is Bob Herbert ALWAYS?

How Wrong Were the Pundits on Obama's 'Race' Speech?

Is Herbert embarrassed by this ludicrously wrong assessment now? I’m guessing not.

Nor would the the pompous Herbert even think of publishing a retraction - because he never has in the past. Apparently he feels that it is his right to be wrong - I think it's a racial thing....

I would trust him over the govt. wonks...

Michael Yon has an offer for the Presidential candidates:

"Whatever we do in Iraq from here forward, we must strive to make better decisions than those made between 2003 and 2006. And one way to achieve that is by making certain that our civilian leaders are fully informed. All three candidates for President are extremely intelligent, but that doesn't mean that all three are tracking the truth on the ground in Iraq. Anyone who wants to be President of the United States needs to see Iraq without the distorting lenses of the media or partisan politics. I would be honored to visit Iraq with Senator Obama, Senator Clinton, Senator McCain or any of their Senate colleagues."

Why dig for details when you can believe whatever you want?

If you want to read a serious book about the intervention in Iraq, try War and Decision

As undersecretary of defense for policy, Feith was one of those most intimately involved in the argument about whether to and, if so, how to put an end to the regime of Saddam Hussein. His book contains notes made in real time at the National Security Council, a trove of declassified documentation, and a thoroughly well-organized catalog of sources and papers and memos. Feith has also done us the service of establishing a Web site where you can go and follow up all his sources and check them for yourself against his analysis and explanation. There is more of value in any chapter of this archive than in any of the ramblings of McClellan. As I write this on the first day of June, about a book that was published in the first week of April, the books pages of the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and the Boston Globe have not seen fit to give Feith a review. An article on his book, written by the excellent James Risen for the news pages of the New York Times, has not run. This all might seem less questionable if it were not for the still-ballooning acreage awarded to Scott McClellan.

The Belmont Club

Furuncle Joseph Stalin:

"An ass, an ass. My kingdom for a carbuncle-free ass."

Read the whole thing.... apparently Karl Marx was the victim of an awful skin ailment that oddly shaped his views of the world. Could it be that an entire chapter of modern history was nothing more than the reaction to a disease? Oy.....

This could be our fate....read it!

Punished for being right:

"MacLeans.CA/blogs is liveblogging the British Columiba Human Rights Tribunal Proceedings against Mark Steyn. The most striking entry in the running narrative of proceedings are these arguments from the complainant's counsel, who tells us, in legalese of course, that freedom of speech confers no protection when offending Islam"

Via Instapundit

Drudge may no longer be reliable GOP ally. In truth, he never has been. Drudge likes sensational news, and puncturing the pompous self-righteousness of Big Media. That's meant he helps the GOP more than the Democrats -- who rely on Big Media's pompous self-righteousness a lot -- but that's more because of the state of the media landscape than because of any alliance.

Because he does not want to...

The Corner on National Review Online: "Even the French Get It

Why doesn t Obama?

BAGHDAD AFP — French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner said on Sunday that the security situation in Iraq was improving and reaffirmed France s willingness to help rebuild the war-ravaged country.

I have the feeling that things are better. Statistics show a drop in security incidents, Kouchner told AFP after a working lunch with his Iraqi counterpart Hoshyar Zebari on the last day of his two-day visit to Iraq.

There is an improvement in the situation in Iraq, he said.

Kouchner also voiced satisfaction at efforts by the Iraqis to take charge of their own country, saying they were making progress."

Not to worry - there is NO threat...

The Belmont Club: The long expected attack comes:

"A car bomb detonated outside the Danish embassy in Islamabad, killing four and injuring several others. Although nobody knows who did yet -- at least not officially -- everybody knows why."

What an acheivement!

Stanford Law Drops Letter Grades

Stanford’s new system — which will award grades of honors, pass, restricted credit and no credit — resembles that at Yale Law School, whose four grades are honors, pass, low pass and fail. Across the bay, the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law also eschews letter grades but has two levels above pass: honors and high honors.

So how, pray tell, is this any different than A-B-C-D? Maybe they would be better-off discussing the law than their feelings.....

HMM. THIS A.P. STORY by Deb Riechmann says that Rove and Libby were behind the Plame leak:

McClellan was ordered to say that White House aides Karl Rove and I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby were not involved in leaking Plame's identity. Later, a criminal investigation revealed that they were.

Silly me. I thought it was Richard Armitage.

Disconnect is what the media does best....

Victor David Hanson:

"How odd (or to be expected) that suddenly intelligence agencies, analysts, journalists, and terrorists themselves are attesting that al-Qaeda is in near ruins, that ideologically radical Islam is losing its appeal, and that terrorist incidents against Americans at home and abroad outside the war zones are at an all-time low—and yet few associate the radical change in fortune in Iraq as a contributory cause to our success."

Must be time to quit...

Improving Iraq:

"It isn’t about body counts, however, since one way to ensure a low casualty rate is to sequester American forces on forward operating bases. What makes the statistic even more impressive is that the low death total came even as the operational tempo was as busy as ever. Coalition Forces, now largely in a supporting role, spent the month busily fighting in three of the roughest areas of the country–Basrah, Sadr City, and Mosul–with impressive results."

Progress...

The return of real men: Ladies, get ready to meet Mr Retrosexual

Well said... and probably true.

The Red Wings Gift to Hockey

"The Wings were great from the start and, except for a stretch in February when they were hit hard by injuries, great the whole season long. And they were great in the way they have been for the last several years: by placing a heavy emphasis on winning the regular-season championship, and by playing a clean game that shunned fighting."

Heh...

Dear Sen. Obama, Join My Church

Sen. Obama, if you love Jesus, and enjoy the fellowship of others who share your faith in Christ, then you and Michelle and the girls might feel at home here.

Of course, we're not perfect. We lack some of the features to which your family has become accustomed. For example, our pastors never talk about political candidates from the pulpit. There's not a whole lot of angry screaming -- in fact, none. No preacher here has ever called down God's condemnation upon our native land.

Reality Bites....

Killing Her Softly

"Enlightened progressives take it for granted that social progress is like technological progress — that women’s rights are like the internal combustion engine or the jet aeroplane: once invented they can’t be uninvented. But that’s a careless assumption. There was a small, nothing story out of Toronto this week — the York University Federation of Students wants a campus-wide ban on any pro-life student clubs. Henceforth, students would be permitted to debate abortion only “within a pro-choice realm”, as the vice-president Gilary Massa put it. Nothing unusual there. A distressing number of student groups are inimical to free speech these days. But then I saw a picture of the gung-ho abortion absolutist: Gilary Massa is a young Muslim woman covered in a hijab.

On such internal contradictions is the future being built. By “The Return Of Patriarchy,” Philip Longman doesn’t mean 1950s sitcom dads. No doubt Western feminists will be relieved to hear that."