The Command Post Op-Ed Page

Moussaoui Sentence Worse Than Death...For Him

The speculation about Zacharias Moussaoui's has ended, knowing that he will be imprisoned for the rest of his life. Peggy Noonan is displeased because he didn't get the death penalty.

Excuse me, I'm sorry, and I beg your pardon, but the jury's decision on Moussaoui gives me a very bad feeling. What we witnessed here was not the higher compassion but a dizzy failure of nerve.

[…]

It is as if we've become sophisticated beyond our intelligence, savvy beyond wisdom. Some might say we are showing a great and careful generosity, as befits a great nation. But maybe we're just, or also, rolling in our high-mindedness like a puppy in the grass. Maybe we are losing some crude old grit. Maybe it's not good we lose it.

[…]

He knew the trigger was about to be pulled. He knew innocent people had been targeted, and were about to meet gruesome, unjust deaths.

He could have stopped it. He did nothing. And so 2,700 people died.

Peggy may think that we wimped out by not sitting his ass down in the electric chair and pulling the switch. But she's overlooked a couple of things.

First, crazy or not, Moussaoui wanted to die, to become a martyr for the twisted harabahist ideology of a fascist Islamic cult. We denied him that 'honor'. He will rot away in a prison cell, out of sight and with no contact with the outside world for the rest of his life.

Second, by sentencing Moussaoui to life in prison at the federal Supermax facility in Colorado, we have done far worse than put him to death. He will be in solitary confinement for the rest of his life. He will have no visitors. He will have no contact with other inmates. He will be locked in his cell 23 hours a day. The only persons he will see will be the guards who will deliver his meals three times a day or escort him to a room for his daily 60 minute exercise period. That is it. He may, on occasion, be visited by some law enforcement or governmental official, but that's all. No friends. No relatives. No imams. Nobody.

To reiterate, we have done far worse than kill him. We have made him a non-entity, a living ghost who will quickly fade out of the the public's memory. And then he will die, as the presiding judge said, quoting T.S.Eliot, “with a whimper.”

I can think of no better fate for him.

Addendum: Do not think that because I believe he received an appropriate sentence that I am against capital punishment. I am not. I believe there are crimes so heinous that death is the only remedy. As I said above, in Moussaoui's case we denied him what he sought and in the process did more than kill him. We made him insignificant, something he feared far more than dying.

How YOU Can Help Fight Illegal Immigration While You Sit There

The great site NumbersUSA has expanded very fast in the past year. Their website lets you fax Congress for free and let your voice be heard on immigration issues.

94,000 additional people in the past year have been free faxing to fix our broken immigration system!

I firmly believe that the faxes from their members had a lot to do with the pressure applied to our representatives in the House that got H.R. 4437 passed in December.

Now they need to raise a few bucks to expand their system infrastructure to handle the explosive growth.

The good news, they have found some grateful soul who cares about the issue so much they will do a 2 for 1 matching donation!

So please, head over to their donation page and send them a few dollars. Even if you just send $20 dollars that will mean $60 dollars to them with the 2 for 1 donation!

And if you haven't already, go fax your Congressional Representatives and let your voice be heard on immigration reform.

If you run a website feel free to copy and paste this in full.

Waving Mexican flags on America's Independence Mall?

Philadelphia's Independence Mall - home of the Liberty Bell and of Independence Hall - was home to quite a spectacle earlier today as 1000 illegal aliens and their supporters marched against proposed immigration legislation. Some of them were even waving large Mexican flags. There are pictures of the protest here (including this with the flags). Here's a report from the local paper.

This was part of the “Day Without an Immigrant” protest. Illegal aliens were asked to not go to their jobs at Philly's restaurants. As was made clear in an earlier article, many Philly restaurants knowingly employ illegal aliens. It also contained a damning quote from the National Restaurant Association.

Realistically speaking, we only have two choices in this matter:

1. Give illegal aliens an amnesty or a “guest” worker scheme of some kind. (Alternatively, just leave things as they are). Those forces who support illegal immigration will still be out there, and they'll even have more power than before. And, they'll continue to support illegal immigration that occurs as a result of the amnesty. Expect to see more protests of this kind until illegal aliens are given almost all the rights of American citizens. Expect to see hostile foreign governments gaining more and more power inside our country and perhaps even agitating their citizens inside our country.

2. Completely oppose those forces who support illegal immigration. That includes those corrupt politicians who for one reason or another support illegal immigration.

With the second option, prices might rise. Would you rather pay a bit more at local restaurants, or would you rather have foreign citizens who are here illegally wave their flags on Independence Mall?

Illegal Aliens Taking Congressional Seats Away From States That Don't Support Them

So you live in a state not affected by illegal aliens, or so you think. Did you know that they count illegal aliens in the census? Well they do and these numbers are put towards how the population is apportioned for seats in Congress.

Non-border states and states without a high population of illegal aliens probably do not take into account the fact that they are slowly being affected by states with high numbers of illegals. By including illegal aliens in the count states like California and Texas receive more seats in the House of Representatives and those with fewer illegal aliens lose seats. Illegal immigration is truly a national issue and not just a problem for those states being inundated with the security and economic implications of being flooded with them.

Your government is being hijacked by illegal immigration and the politicians and states that support them.

Boston Globe

A Republican lawmaker yesterday proposed changing the US Constitution to exclude non-citizens from the census for the purpose of drawing congressional districts, a move that effectively would deny them a voice in US politics.

Under the present system, as determined by the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, the Census Bureau counts all individuals living in the country, once every 10 years. These data are used when drawing up the 435 congressional districts and when determining each state's vote in the Electoral College that decides presidential elections.

...

Supporters argue that the presence of non-citizens caused nine seats in the House to change hands between states in 2000.

California gained six seats it would not have had otherwise, while Texas, New York, and Florida each gained one seat. Meanwhile, Indiana, Michigan, Mississippi, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin each lost a seat and Montana, Kentucky, and Utah each failed to receive a seat they would otherwise have gained.

Originally posted at Diggers Realm

French Riots: An Everyday Frenchmans Perspective - Must Read!

I received a very informative email from Simon in France. Simon has given me permission to post it and for any other bloggers out there that wish to, feel free to repost it. Other than minor editing here it is in it's entirety.

It seems that in USA, people are misinformed about the spread of the riots. let me give you a piece of enlightenment about them.

Muslim riots happened in areas mostly populated by Muslim immigrants (up to 80%).
The riots were contained in those areas by a police which were conscious of not committing any flaw that was expected by the Mollas to upsurge all the Muslim people.

Most of the rioters were known by the police for many acts of serious delinquency .Some spent few years in jails others were probably relaxed by a Justice poisoned by Marxists ( Syndicat de la Magistrature - union of leftist lawers ) .In my opinion , those gangsters were monitored by the Mollas who pushed them to provoke the authorities , expecting any flaws that could be used to upsurge the whole Muslim Mass.

Those Muslim bastards never come and put the mess in French countryside villages where most of people are deer-hunters and have hunting guns. Should they do it, be sure that they will be welcome by the same kind of "welcoming committee " that in any USA village. They know it.

Unfortunately, these riots didn't spread in well-standard living areas where the so-called "bobo" live. Should it happen , that it would wake them up from their mental anesthesia.

France people can be divided in 4 categories:
The Politicians, the " BOBO ", the French popular Mass and the aliens.

All French politicians (right and left), are graduate from ENA ( Ecole nationale d'Administration ) where their little brains were formatted by those stupid utopias ( so called "Valeurs républicaines" ) , to become the puppets of a few powerful people belonging to the international industrial and finance world .Worst , they are certainly members of a freemasonry sect called "Loge du grand orient" famous for its atheism and strong anti-clerical ideas. They let the Muslims come in, to give low-wage employees to our companies, even in a time our European countries became hit by unemployment.

Pushed by far-leftist activist, they set the Family Gathering Scheme in the name of "Human rights"
Knowing the kind of welfare system they could benefit in France, Muslims came in mass with wife (s) and made many children receiving money for it!

Even illegal immigrants came in mass knowing that they can get support from Marxist Associations.
Industrial and finance powerful men were happy with that prospect because they think only "consumers in a Multiculturalism world" and disregard religion and cultural differences.

They have done the same mistake that all Western World politicians have done.

Like Maurice Allais pointed out (French economist who received Economy Nobel Price): with their family , immigrants from undeveloped countries cost 4 to 5 more that they can give to our society. Worst their religion and customs push them to reject our western values and make them inassimilable to our European civilization. Their immigration in Europe is only profitable to a minority of swines in power.

"bobo" means bourgeois-boheme ( happy-go-lucky upper middle class) .This degenerate upper middle class controls nearly everything : education, literature, media, justice ..They are poisoned by utopist ideas ( "everybody is nice, peace and love , multiculturalism , world is a village ") and have set a dictatorship of thoughts in France .They believe that their extremely idiot thoughts is well-thinking ("intellectuel").

They enjoy a good living and can't (or doesn't want) see reality .All upper middle class in Europe have the same disease.

They are so silly that they can't make any difference between the European immigrants that came in France after www1 and www2 and the Muslim one .I spent hours to explain them that this first immigration was easily assimilated because of our common values, customs and RELIGION!

They don't want to admit that Muslims are simply aliens.

The fact that they disregard religion in the name of "laicity" blind them on Islam antagonisms with both Western civilization and the so-called "laicity".

Well set in a comfortable way of life they don't want to be told about the prospect of a Civilization War between Western countries and Muslim world that could hit down their quiet and luxury life.

They do prefer giving lessons to others all around the world rather than questioning themselves.

Even if not Marxists, they have been poisoned by Marxism dictatorship of thoughts through medias and education and probably believe that they can change the world with their big trap and little balls.

These "bobo" think that France colonialism has exploited North-Africa and Africa and they use culpabilization against French people to justify their laxism towards Muslim immigration.

Argue against them and you are systematically a racist who risk to be suited.

Everybody who knows something about history of "Industrial revolution " in Europe in XIX century knows that the corebase was coalmining and steelworking. In France, those two were in North and Northeastern France (Lorraine disputed between France and Germany for that reason).

I am a native from Lorraine: my parents and grand parents were labours in steelworking, and I can tell you and all those stupid "bobo " that Lorraine has never been neither in Africa nor in Arabian countries. This to say that no Industrial country (USA and Europe) got rich and powerful with coffee, tea, orange and bananas! From Africa. Worst, France spent a lot of money in Africa and Maghreb to help them to develop. Algeria benefits from heavy investments at a time it was a French colony. All that for peanuts.

Should we have kept our money in our pocket that our economy would be more flourishing nowadays.

Aside their anti-Christian mentality, the "bobo" has plaid an insane anti-patriotism activism, thinking that could help Europe nations to fuse in one.

As a matter of fact Marxists took profit of the WWI European suicide to inject their stinking ideology.

It is obvious that 90 yrs after WW1, France didn't really recover from it. Anybody who does visit France should take attention to the Death Monuments settled in the middle of each French village and little towns.You will find much more names engraved on stone than living inhabitants.

More than 1.5 millions of French brave guys on a population roughly 40 million sacrificed themselves with a self-abnegation that only Russians did equal during WW2 in the Stalingrad battle.

Adding probably 1 million more due to subsequent disease in 1918 and you get a reap of youth.

Marxism took the opportunity of this drama and shock to spread in France through 2 political party: Socialist Party and then Communist Party. Both fuse in the Front Popular and won the election in 1936.

Worst they welcome in France their communist brothers from Spain and Italy after these two countries turned sad. Part of French communists are descendant of these Italian and Spanish communists.

Once in power their concerns were social sheme, offering holidays to workers, favoring class-strikes, puting the mess in armament factories, at a time a guy called Adolf Hitler was rearming his Reich. Every knows the following of the story.

To end with the "bobo" and their hypocritical concerns with "social welfare ", they should learn that the first social protection for labours to be implemented in Europe was in German Reich by a man called Otto von Bismark. As you know , he was far to be a Marxist!

In conclusion with Politicians and the "bobo" chapters: in a day we are celebrating the sacrifice of ww1generation , there is no need to say that the Braves are spinning in their tombs and trenches .Looking at "bobo" and politicians , and sick of it our Brave French ancestors are throwing out .they are not the only one .

French popular mass does also: this is the so-called silent Majority formed with Middle class and labours .
They are both French rooted people and French native descendants of European immigrants, which made efforts to fuse in French people.

You can't see them demonstrating in street: THEY do WORK! Except when hit by unemployment .
They are bored of paying taxes:

• to feed illegal immigrants


• to assist lazy people who does not want to make any effort


• to refill the loss of government owned companies

They are bored of being insulted of racist and fascist by the "bobo" , when they complain about Muslim unwillingness to accept our European values.

They are bored of corrupted politicians.

They are bored of strikes by a few Marxist activists, which nowadays do represent NOTHING in the Labour population.

In my humble opinion, I think the pot is boiling, nobody knows yet how and when it will explode.

Let me say something about the European immigrants in France:

My father ancestors were Austrian and migrate in 1715 while my mother's parents were Italians and migrate in 1919. I was at school with the French native sons of Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Polish Hungarian immigrants. Their parents came in France with a snotty nose and nothing even a bundle. They work hard: to build a House, and to give a welI education to their children.

I grew up with their children. Never saw them rioting, selling drugs, burning cars.
THEY worked hard at school, they wanted to learn and get a job. Bloody hell! There was a kind of gentle competition between us to be the best at School!

The "Bobo" and Politicians, who both never grew up with European immigrants, are so blinded by their shit "Republican Values and Laicity " that they ignore what made the fusion possible: CHRISTIAN VALUES and GRECO-ROMAN VALUES. Believers or not believers, most of European immigrants were educated at home through a remaining of CHRISTIAN VALUES.

I am not a believer, my Mum is a strong one. Even ignorant about religion, I was educated with mother's Christian values and I can tell you that I know all the benefit of them! Like it or not: These values are the Key success in both USA and Europe.

So long we will keep them against winds and tides, we will survive.
Let the bastards of any kind undermine them, and we westerners will be destroyed.

Aliens: Those are the Muslims immigrants. There is nothing to be said about them (you saw them at TV news) except that our European politicians let them do their Djiad in our home with the support of stupid "bobo" who think that the riots are a expression of "social despair ". BULLSHIT!

My late father was a labour and a non-believer, he worked with some Muslims labours in a steelwork company and therefore knew very much about their beliefs. Some of them were living in a house next to my grand mother's one, at a time the Muslims were staying as "single". Of course they were nice and helpful people.

But the day the Politicians bastards allow them to call their wife and family in France 30 yrs ago, my father who knew much about his Muslim colleagues told me something I will never forget.

"These Muslims are nice persons BUT they are different from us. Once settled, their Imans and Mollas will come and put their hand over Muslims. They will tell them to make as many children as they can to conquest and impose Islam. My bet that in 50 years, Europe will be the next Liban." Was he wrong? Have a look on TV news!

Some brave historians who dared facing the Marxist "well thinking ", told several years ago of a tough "wake-up" and a "RECONQUISTA " in all Europe in the future. Whatever the human cost, this reconquista will be beneficial for all Europeans, because it will remind them what are their real identity and VALUES. Those they should have never swapped for bullshit something values.

Diggers, that was long to write and long for you to read. Sorry for the inconvenience.
Please, do me a favor: be nice to repost it to how many blog you can: la shawn barber and so on

BEST REGARDS from FRANCE

Well Simon, I don't actually operate La Shawn Barber's Corner, but I'll send it to her and see what she thinks.

Originally posted at Diggers Realm

US Air Force Academy and Christian Faith

Originally posted at Confessions of a Pilgrim

Today on the floor of the House of Representatives Indiana Representative John Hostettler erupted in a fit of inspired rhetoric that resulted in the transcription halting for roughly 45 minutes while order was restored. What Mr. Hostettler said will be all over the MSM by dawn. Why he said it may be missed in the feeding frenzy.

There is some background here that is important to understand before we get to the meat of this thing.

I've been following the reports coming out of Colorado Springs for about 6 months. From what I have read and heard there does indeed seem to be something going on out there and the Academy, if not the big boys at the Pentagon, should be looking into it.

Unfortunately, the US House of Representatives decided to jump the gun today when Section 9012 of the Defense Appropriations bill which read in part:

Congressional Record for June 20, 2005
[Page: H4759]

(1) PLAN.—The Secretary of the Air Force shall develop a plan to ensure that the Air Force Academy maintains a climate free from coercive religious intimidation and inappropriate proselytizing by Air Force officials and others in the chain-of-command at the Air Force Academy. The Secretary shall work with experts and other recognized notable persons in the area of pastoral care and religious tolerance to develop the plan.

(2) REPORT.—Not later than 60 days after the date of the enactment of this Act, the Secretary shall submit to the congressional defense committees a report providing the plan developed pursuant to paragraph (1). The Secretary shall include in the report information on the circumstances surrounding the removal of Air Force Captain Melinda Morton from her position at the Air Force Academy on May 4, 2005.

was read and quickly amended by Representative Duncan Hunter(R-CA) to read:

Amendment offered by Mr. Hunter:

Strike section 9012 (page 115, line 14, through page 117, line 5) and insert the following:

SEC. 9012. SENSE OF CONGRESS AND REPORT CONCERNING RELIGIOUS FREEDOM AND TOLERANCE AT UNITED STATES AIR FORCE ACADEMY.—

(a) Sense of Congress.—It is the sense of Congress that—

(1) the expression of personal religious faith is welcome in the United States military;

(2) the military must be a place where there is freedom for religious expression for all faiths; and

(3) the Secretary of the Air Force and the Department of Defense Inspector General have undertaken several reviews of the issues of religious tolerance at the Air Force Academy.

(b) Report.—

(1) RECOMMENDATIONS.—The Secretary of the Air Force, based upon the reviews referred in subsection (a)(3), shall develop recommendations to maintain a positive climate of religious freedom and tolerance at the United States Air Force Academy.

(2) SECRETARY OF AIR FORCE REPORT.—Not later than 90 days after the date of the enactment of this Act, the Secretary shall submit to the congressional defense committees a report providing the recommendations developed pursuant to paragraph (1).

which essentially allows the Academy to continue their reviews and supply their recommendations to the Congress before any thing more was to be done. The original language of the bill would force the Academy to halt their ongoing investigation and comply with the “sense of the Congress”. Mr. Hunter was correct in suggesting allowing the Academy and the Air Force to continue their investigation.

During the ensuing debate Mr. Hunter clarified why he added the amendment:

[Page: H4760][emphasis added]

My point is this, there are a number of reviews that are ongoing right now at the Academy, and in this letter that Acting Secretary of the Air Force, Secretary Michael Dominguez, sent to me, I think the crux of our amendment is laid out and I think justifies. He talks about the work that is ongoing to make sure that the Academy has religious freedom and religious tolerance. He says, As this work progresses, and I am quoting the Secretary, our work and critics of that work will generate news stories. It was a news story that generated this base provision that is in the bill. I ask that you reserve your opinions on this matter until I can get to ground truth through the objective processes now ongoing.

That is what he asks for. He has got lots of reviews, and what we say is, we reestablish, revalidate that there should be both freedom of religion and religious tolerance, and we set a date for a report to come back after the reviews are done, for the Secretary of the Air Force to report back to us with the reviews and with recommendations.

Amen and Amen Rep. Hunter! We cannot continue to allow the media to determine policy for our military whether that is on the battlefield or the classroom. Unfortunately for the House this debate took a decidedly bad turn. Mr. Hunter took exception to the “coercive religious intimidation and inappropriate proselytizing” portion of Section 1 of the portion of the bill in question.

[Page: H4760]

The word “proselytizing'' could possibly be applied to what they were doing in that battleground in Iraq[Pilgrim: A Church service Mr. Hunter was forced to enter during a mortar attack] . I have always thought that when I argue religion I am making reasoned judgments and the other guy is proselytizing, and the problem is with that word. With establishing that as a standard, that people in uniform have to adhere to, the average person in uniform is going to say, what does proselytizing mean? Am I proselytizing, and if they are not sure whether or not their statement is proselytizing, you know what they are going to do? They are not going to say anything, and we are going to put a chill on what we have heretofore for our entire history welcomed, and that is, expression of religious views by our uniformed personnel.

Representative David Obey (D-WI) entered into the discussion:

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the last word.

Mr. Chairman, the language of the committee amendment does nothing whatsoever to discourage proselytizing. What it does is make clear that the Congress of the United States is opposed to coercive and abusive proselytizing. I think it would be good to go back and look at the history of this problem.

This is a classic tactic of the left, inserting some fairly harsh words(coercive, abusive) but still vague enough that ANY definition could be applied to them. Is inviting a fellow cadet to a Bible Study coercive? Is denying to laugh at a crude joke or correcting religiously offensive behavior abusive? We are so worried about offending Mohammed at Gitmo yet a Christian can't say, “Don't say that around me” when someone says “goddamnit!” because it's coercive or abusive.

This is probably what set Representative John Hostettler (R-IN) off a bit later when he said:

[Page H4763]

Mr. HOSTETTLER. Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the requisite number of words.

Mr. Chairman, the long war on Christianity in America continues today on the floor of the United States House of Representatives. It continues unabated

[Page: H4764]

with aid and comfort to those who would eradicate any vestige of our Christian heritage being supplied by the usual suspects, the Democrats. Do not get me wrong. Democrats know they should not be doing this. The spirit of, if not the exact, language in the underlying bill added by the Democrat ranking member, the gentleman from Wisconsin was offered by a Democrat in the Armed Services Committee during consideration of the fiscal year 2006 DOD authorization bill.

The author of that language in the authorizing committee, the gentleman from New York, has suggested since that time that “extremist groups'' are behind the removal of language similar to his. I and others who spoke in opposition to that amendment had never even heard of the notion of such an amendment until the gentleman from New York actually offered it during the committee markup. And so I am curious as to who these extremists are that the gentleman from New York spoke of.

Mr. Chairman, we may never know because that is the nature of this debate, name-calling of unspecified people and groups who hold a world view different than many of these Democrats. And, as I said, Mr. Chairman, Democrats know they should not be doing this. Following the overwhelming opposition voiced at the DOD markup, the Democrat ranking member of the committee requested the gentleman from New York to withdraw the amendment, which he did. *.*.*

The last sentence of Mr. Hostettler's remarks were stricken from the record at HIS OWN REQUEST roughly an hour later.(Mr. Durbin, take note of this please) Mr. Obey saw fit to make sure they made there way into the record however:

[Page: H4764]

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I move that the gentleman's words be taken down.

The CHAIRMAN. The gentleman will suspend.

The Clerk will transcribe the words.

[Time: 16:26]

Mr. HOSTETTLER. Mr. Chairman, I ask unanimous consent to withdraw the last sentence I spoke.

The CHAIRMAN. Is there objection to the request of the gentleman from Indiana?

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, reserving the right to object, I think the House needs to understand why I objected to the language of the gentleman.

As I understand it, the language that the gentleman is saying he will withdraw is the following: “Like moth to a flame, Democrats can't help themselves when it comes to denigrating and demonizing Christians.''

The reader will notice the time marker in the above quote. This denotes a suspension of the transcription while a minor brawl erupted on the House floor. No punches or the like of a Sumner-Brooks fight on the Senate Floor but rather a rhetorical brawl where Mr. Hostettler was threatened with censure if he didn't have his own words stricken. To his credit, he didn't take two days and issue a weak statement…he did the right thing and had his overly heated rhetoric stricken from the record. Not because he thought what he said was wrong, but because the work of the House had to continue and he wanted to be part of it. You can go to the Congressional Record and read Brer Obey's attempt to extricate himself, and his party, from the tarpit Representative Hostettler had tossed them into. The fact remains that Hostettler was right in what he said but perhaps he could have used different words so he didn't have to remove them from the record later.

There is a war against Christianity and the opposition uses veiled words with intentionally vague definitions. Any attempt to offer a Christian prayer at a public function is met with severe and immediate reactions by the opposition claiming the mythical “seperation of Church and state”. Let someone wish to offer a Muslim prayer at a public function and it's called Diversity.

Achilles Last Stand: The Primal Heroic Response

© David Blue, 2005

“If you faint in the day of adversity,
your strength is small.
Rescue those who are being taken away to death;
hold back those who are stumbling to slaughter.
If you say, “Behold, we did not know this,”
does not he who weighs the heart perceive it?”
   — Proverbs 24: 10-12

I composed this piece in response to Joe's Zimbabwe Changed My Mind: Guns Are A Human Right. (And I must thank Joe for some editing I asked for, but the final result is Nobody's Fault But Mine.) Joe talked about a number of things in his post, but I want to draw on my personal experience here and focus on one thing: what makes people act when the chips are down?

Where, in other words, do heroes come from?

It isn't just a rhetorical question - understanding the answer could save somebody's life.

• Perceptions: In Through The Out Door
• Recognition: Dazed And Confused
• Action: In The Light
• Heroism: In My Time of Dying
• Reality: When the Levee Breaks
• Afterthoughts: Ramble On

THIS Is A Gulag

Irene Khan, Secretary General of Amnesty International has characterized the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay as “the gulag of our times”, demonstrating her utter lack of perspective or knowledge of history. Anne Applebaum, the author of GULAG: a History, neatly places the Soviet Gulag into the proper historical context (excerpted from a PBS interview and cleaned it up for readability):

It belongs in the context most obviously of the Holocaust, which… killed six million Jews plus many millions of other people plus the enormous destruction of the Second World War. It belongs in the context of the Chinese and Cambodian revolutions and the… famine in China and the culture revolution in China which…which killed-the…Chinese, the experience of Chinese communism is probably in the… many, many tens of millions. The gulag itself… I think my estimate is that some eighteen million people passed through the camps… of which two to three million probably died.

Nationmaster attempts to enumerate the physical toll of the Soviet Gulag system:

Read the Rest…

Buchanan, Nazi Apologists and Revisionist History

[by Armed Liberal] I challenged conservative historian Niall Ferguson's misinterpretation of World War II's cost below; Robin Burk added a great precis of Walzer on war afterwards.

But it takes one of the original idiotarians, Pat Buchanan, to misinterpret the end of that war.

Stephen Green shows Buchanan for the fool his arguments make him. My favorite line:

It took 40 years, but today Pat Buchanan hit bottom on the slippery slope from Young Turk conservative columnist to Nazi Apologist troglodyte.

Minuteman Project Has 15,000 Volunteers

15,000 people have volunteered to give up their free time to patrol our borders with the Minuteman Project and report not only illegal aliens, but potential terrorists to the proper government authorities. Why anyone would be against a group doing this voluntarily and with no direct confrontation is beyond me. Border Patrol and the US government should be lauding these people for providing a service for free that not only secures our borders, but helps the overburdened Border Patrol.

Washington Times

The organizer of last month's Minutemen border protest says more than 15,000 people have volunteered for future citizen patrols along the Mexican border.

"We considerer this a mandate from the citizens of the United States," Chris Simcox will tell a hearing of the House Government Reform Committee Thursday, according to a copy of his prepared testimony obtained by United Press International.

Tipped by: Speed of Thought

Originally Posted at Diggers Realm

ANZAC Day

Today, in Australia, it's ANZAC day.

Last years post says it all, and I invite all readers to revisit it.

This one though is dedicated to Lieutenant Matthew Goodall, Royal Australian Navy.

I knew him at ADFA, the Australian Defence Force Academy, merely as Midshipman Goodall, in the late 90's. In the CompSci lab (Universally pronounced Kompski by the students), as with all the officer cadets, I'd peered over his shoulder as he was working, sometimes sitting next to him and explaining a solution, sometimes getting him to write on the whiteboard as the class discussed alternate ways of tackling a problem.

“Well done that man. Next Victim!… Hmmmm…. Midshipman Goodall!”
“Yea!” “Onya Matt!” “Show us how to do it mate!” “Get stuffed the lot of ya!”

Those may not have been the exact words. From memory, he was a pretty laid-back kind of guy, coolly competent, the kind to take banter in his stride. Polite too, a good-natured grin would be more his style, as he did, indeed, show the rest how to do it.

If it was in my power, I'd grant him a Summa Cum Laude, not just for Computer Science, but for something far deeper and more important. Lieutenant Goodall died along with eight others while delivering relief supplies to earthquake victims when the Sea King helicopter they were in crashed in Indonesia recently.

Greater Love Hath No Man…

To me, he'll always be 19 years old, decked out in his dress whites and shorts, cracking the odd joke with the rest of the class, swearing at the bloody machine and tapping away at the keyboard in the lab.

They shall grow not old
as we that are left grow old
Age shall not weary them
nor the years condemn
At the going down of the sun
and in the morning
We will remember them.
Lest we forget.

Onya Matt.

What is this Country’s Judicial System coming to?!

I don't know why this infuriates me so. I mean we knew the man was incompetent but his testimony yesterday after pleading guilty just crawls under my skin. His testimony ANY day regarding this is just pathetic.

“I exercised very poor judgment in the course of reviewing the files,” Berger told reporters outside the courthouse after pleading guilty. “I deeply regret it. It was mistaken and it was wrong.”
…
“My motivation was to help prepare myself and others,” he said.

Hmmm…so you “mistakenly” stole documents from the National Archives, took them home, and destroyed them by cutting them up with scizzors? Ya know, I came up with some pretty good tales attempting to get away without doing my homework in grade school but this one would have gotten me a very sore butt.

$10,000 and no jail time for stealing National Security Documents? G. Gordon Liddy was convicted of a felony and served 4 years in prison for attempting to steal campaign material. Sure…that makes sense.

This line makes me wonder how much he was paid by the Kerry campaign/Clinton cabal:

He would not answer questions as to why he decided to destroy three of the documents.

So far this week we have watched a woman starve to death because the Judicial System said it was OK while a Trade Lawyer/former NSA walks for stealing and destroying National Security Documents. Is it just me or is something askew here?

I've been torn about the Schiavo Case. The law is what the law is and the Courts had their say which amounts to State Sponsored Torture in my view. No one had the stones to do anything about it…although doing something about it would mean Jeb Bush calling out his “posse” to go liberate Mrs. Schiavo and placing his brother in a terrible position. The laws that put her, and us, in this position need to be changed. The US Senate passed an Unconstitutional Bill of Attainder and folks screamed about the 11th Circuit ignoring what it said. Whatever. The Senate screwed up in a BIG way but I'm growing used to that. The Republican Leadership won't step up to the plate and stop the unconstitutional actions of the democratic minority for reasons that escape me. So…a woman dies a painful agonizing death and we all pat ourselves on the back because, once again, we have let the Judicial System work it's magic on a case originating in Florida.

I'm not at all torn about the Burger case. He's a thief. He stole from MY National Archives. He stole National Security Documents because MY Congress trusted him. He's a thief of the worst kind. He betrayed the trust MY Country placed in him. Treason? No. IDIOCY? Certainly. But once again we're faced with allowing the Judicial System to work it's magic or forming our own little gang of vigilantes and taking care of this problem. Clearly the vigilante approach is out of the question. I wouldn't touch Mr. Burger for fear of catching something and he's not worth the bullet or the rope anyway. So he walks.

As I am typing this the Pope is near death in Rome. It's clear he's gonna die and has no quality of life right now. Let's just go ahead and kill him. He can't eat or drink on his own so remove that feeding tube and watch him dry up and starve. The US Supremes have quoted International Law…why not apply US Law to the Vatican? Put him out of his misery right? That's what we did in Florida right?

While we pat ourselves on the back for killing Mrs. Schiavo and the Pope I think I'll go to the National Archives and steal the Declaration of Independence. $10,000 is a small price to pay compared to what I could get for it on Ebay.

Originally posted on Confessions of a Pilgrim

Your Actions Matter - and You Are NEVER Powerless

I've had this post slated for this day for a week now. How ironic that it would run the same day as Armed Liberal's post about the extraordinary kids of Carl Hayden High… and how appropriate.

Paul Loeb has written a book called The Impossible Will Take a Little While: A Citizen's Guide to Hope in a Time of Fear. It leans left, and there's some material in it whose tone and therapeutic orientation reflect the left's current state rather than offering vital self-reflection. So why bother with it? Because there's also a lot of good material and truth, stuff that crosses party lines and ought to speak to citizens of all political affiliations - or none. I'm on the email list, and this is an example that was just crying out to be shared. I've received permission from Paul Loeb to do so.

I'll start with the money 'grafs, then continue on to the full article below the fold:

“In many cultures, there is a disembodied force that demands that every action be ethical: honor. “Bog, Honor, Ojczyzna,” or “God, Honor, Country,” is the Polish national motto. My stays in Poland introduced me to otherwise empty-handed activists who faced off against Nazis, Communists, and now, capitalism, with relentless personal power. “Burnout” and “apathy” were not in their vocabulary. Even when serving time in prisons that appeared on no map, they felt visible. Honor recorded their every deed, and ensured that it mattered.

I suspect that we all have our three-in-the-morning moments, when all of life seems one no-exit film noir, where any effort is pointless, where any hope seems to be born only to be dashed, like a fallen nestling on a summer sidewalk. When I have those moments, if I do nothing else, I remind myself: the ride in the snow; the volunteers at the food bank; the Nepali peasants who fed me. Activists like the Pole Wladyslaw Bartoszewski who, decades before he would earn any fame, got out of Auschwitz only to go on to even more resistance against the Nazis, and then the Soviets. Invisible, silent people who, day by day, choice by choice, unseen by me, unknown to me, force me to witness myself, invite me to keep making my own best choices, and keep me living my ideals.”

Amen. Your deeds matter - and you are never powerless. There's lots more good stuff in Danusha Veronica Goska's essay - here's the whole thing…

A Special Holocaust Museum Opens In Israel

This was published earlier on Joe Gandelman's weblog The Moderate Voice.

In early 1973, a few months before he died, my grandfather Abraham Ravinsky opened for the last time a old, yellowing, musty smelling photo album.

“You see this one, Joey?” he said, pointing to a picture of a child. “He was killed by Hitler.”

Then he'd point to a group shot of family members, all wiped out “by Hitler.” This man who had survived the Czar's pogroms in Russia, and gotten to the U.S. right the Communists (who he hated) took power later learned that many of his beloved, left-behind relatives had been murdered by the Nazis or died in concentration camps. But his beloved wife Rose, and daughters Ruth, Anne and Helen were safe in the U.S. and he raised his family here.

My grandfather NEVER forgot what happened - and on that day he was again making sure I would never forget as he opened his memory book, glanced at it, then looked at my face to see if it registered, his Spencer Tracy-like face capped by a head of pure white hair then turning to find yet another page to show me with more photos of human beings whose lives were wiped out because of the utlimate act of political and racial demonization.

In Israel on Monday, a special museum was opened. It commemorates the Holocaust — so no one can EVER forget. Even reading a small portion of the Washington Post account will haunt you (if you are human) for days. Here's a small part (read it all yourself):

JERUSALEM, March 15 — The grainy black-and-white photographs of death shock the senses. But it is the personal remnants of life that wrench the heart — a red-and-white polka-dot bow from a little girl's dress, a postcard flung from a cattle car by a desperate mother, an entry scrawled in a diary one horrible day more than 60 years ago.

“A sight that I will never forget as long as I live,” Abraham Lewin, a teacher in Warsaw, wrote on Sept. 11, 1942. “Five tiny children, 2- and 3-year-olds, sit on a cot in the open field. . . . They bellow and scream without stopping. . . . 'Mommy, Mommy, I want to eat!' The soldiers are shooting continually and the shots silence the children's crying for a moment.”

Lewin's diary, the little red bow and a vast array of other personal items displayed in the new Holocaust History Museum — inaugurated by Israel on Tuesday — represent a dramatic transformation in this country's attitudes toward the dominant event in modern Jewish history, according to historians and museum organizers.

Historians say it is the kind of museum that Israel could not have contemplated 32 years ago, when its predecessor opened. Emotions were still raw then, families of Holocaust victims weren't psychologically ready to give up personal mementos, and the Israeli national consciousness centered on the entire Jewish community rather than on individuals.

“Until a few years ago, we looked at the Holocaust as a phenomenon of the collective,” said Dalia Ofer, a professor of Holocaust studies at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. “We never thought of how each individual person who was consigned to life in the ghetto tried to live his life. This doesn't take away the importance of the collective . . . but another element has been added.”

“We're putting individuals at the center, delivering history through personal stories,” said Avner Shalev, chief curator of the $56 million museum, which took a decade to plan and build.

Yes, it was personal. As personal as my grandfather, pointing to each photo, telling me something about the little boy in the photo who had his brains blown out, about the robust-looking tall, thin man with the long, gray beard who he was told died in a concentration camp, about the group photo showing five people whose final years were filled with unspeakable horrors, grief and pain.

The Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz, Amira Hass writes:

We remember and feel the pain of that liquidation day by day. Let us confront them with it day by day. For example, let it be inscribed on a large marble slab outside every house in which Jews used to live, where they were deported and where they were murdered. Let every railway station from which the human transports were dispatched provide the information: when, how many trains a day, how many people. Let the names of those responsible for the transport be written down - at the police station, the railway station, city hall.

The way to fight the fading memory is not merely with memorial monuments and ceremonies. It is done mainly with an uncompromising rejection of the master race ideology, which divided the world into superior and inferior races and denied the principle of equality among human beings. We were placed at the bottom of the ladder of the Nazi ideology. Would this ideology not have been criminal had we been ranked in the upper rungs?

An ideology that divides the world into those who are worth more and those who are worth less, into superior and inferior beings, does not have to reach the dimensions of the German genocide to be improper and wrong - the apartheid in South Africa, for example.

In her piece, Hass warns Israelis about falling into the same trap in regards to the Palestinians. And that point is a good issue for another time.

But today, I read about the museum and think about my grandfather showing me that book, turning a page, looking at my face. He had done this before but he did it with more determination that day…that last time.

He didn't know it would be the last time he would remind and warn me.

But, then, none of us know if it'll be the last time when we remind and warn young people of what happened.

So we do it when we can — and museums do it when we can't.

Buyer's Remorse

A spark was lit when I read this yesterday :

That’s right, personal responsibility. I still believe in that and I’ll be holding myself as well as all my republican friends responsible for getting that guy elected. At the same time, in my defense, I still don’t think Kerry was a viable alternative. Not because he’s a dem. (I voted for Clinton and would have done it again if I could have) but because I just don’t like the guy.

Similar words have been spoken/written by me several times in the past couple of weeks to close friends. Some have reacted with dropped jaws, some have just nods sympathetically.

I've also left similar sentiments in comments on various blogs and, for the most part, they were met with a flurry of clenched fists and righteous indignation, with calls for me to go out and start protesting (or something like that) to prove my regret.

Well…no. It's not like that. First of all, I am not sitting here admitting to the world (ok, just the minuscule part of the world who reads this) that I regret my vote so I can, oh, get a pat on the head or a clap on the back or a wide-armed welcome back to the fold. I'm not going back to any fold and I don't seek anyone's approval.

So what is it that's causing my “buyer's remorse” as it's been called? It's a combination of things, and most of it stems from the fact that I was a one issue voter in 2004. And now, the issues I ignored in order to give my support to the war on terror are coming back to haunt me.

Social Security. Bankruptcy. The insistence of the far right that they have some kind of religious mandate now and we need to revert back to our Christian roots and morals. And yes, Iraq. I know all about the good things in Iraq. I know about the schools and the hospitals and elections. And I love that. I love the slow spread of democracy. I love the trickle down effect of taking Saddam out of power. But more and more, I'm thinking, at what price? Every time another soldier dies, another bomb goes off, another hopeful Iraqi policeman is murdered, another hostage is taken and another day looms on the horizon with no end in sight, I think at what price?

I'm not about to go stand on some street corner and protest the war. It's not like that. But my all-out support has certainly waned. I see no clear exit strategy. I just see more of our men and women dying. I just see more innocent Iraqis dying. Every day, first thing in the morning, I bring up my Command Post editing page and look through the morning news. And the stories are always the same. Car bomb. Roadside bomb. Death. Dead. Soldier killed. There used to be much more good news interspersed with those reports. But my hope for seeing this work has dissipated.

I know some of you are ready right now to send me links, to lecture me on why Iraq will turn out ok, why the spread of democracy will come about, why Syria and Iran and North Korea will all fall eventually. That would be great if it was my only gripe with this administration. But it's not.

And it's my own damn fault. What did I think would happen down the road as a one issue voter? I didn't think far enough ahead, I guess, to see how those other issues - with me as gay rights supporting, fiscally conservative atheist - would affect me later on. That once the smoke from the war on terror cleared, so to speak, I would have to deal with the fact that I voted in an administration that stands for a lot of things I'm against.

Not that I would have voted for Kerry. Just because I'm experiencing this regret doesn't mean I'm going to go running back to the left. I abandoned them with good reason. So I'm back where I was right around September 11, 2001. Standing firmly in the middle, getting a little flogging from both sides. I spent years on the left side of the line and discovered I didn't like it there. And now I spent a few years on the right side of the line and, frankly, I hate it here. I thought the “big tent” of the Republican party would be home. Turns out it was just a temporary shelter, given to me by the party who knew damn well that I was only as good as my support for the war on terror.

There are others out there like me. I talk to them at work. I talk to them in the parking lot of schools, waiting for our kids. I talk to them in email or instant message, people from across the country who feel that twinge of regret. What we all have in common is this: we feel used. We feel taken advantage of. We feel manipulated.

This is where some people are going to expect an apology. Don’t hold your breath. That’s not what this is about. When I made my vote, I did so with the best interest of my family in mind. I honestly believed I was making the right choice. I wasn’t the one who voted a certain way just because I hated the opponent. I believed in the war on terror. I believed in the war in Iraq. I believed that the other issues weren’t as important. So I’m not looking for forgiveness for anything. And this doesn’t mean that I’m going to suddenly sign up for the Democrat party and start carrying around No Blood For Oil placards. There are people who have seen this “confession” from me already who assume this means I think George W. Bush is an evil person, that I’ve finally joined the BusHitler crowd. No. Hardly. I don’t hate George Bush, much as I don’t hate John Kerry. I just don’t think that either of them is what America needs.

That opens up a lot of questions, most of which don’t have ready answers. What does American need? Who is the right person for this country? How do we fix Social Security? Who will make our future fiscally sound? How do we stop the bleeding in Iraq and at the sam time, keep Iran and Syria at bay, without losing more and more of our good men and women in the armed forces? How can we learn to accept people who are different from us? How can we stop trying to legislate someone else’s idea of morality? How can we teach the people of this country to start taking responsibility for their own lives instead of expecting the government (or trial lawyers) to do their decision making for them? How can we make our education system better for our children?

I placed my wager and lost. Unfortunately, there was no real winning wager this time around. Is there a person out there who will make us all feel like winners? Or is that just a pipe dream? Will there every be a candidate who will please mostly everyone?

I’m not looking for absolution from Democrats and I’m not looking to be reviled by Republicans. I’m just voicing my opinion that I think things have gone steadily downhill since November. I find myself in more and more instances slinking away from the right. But I stop at dead center because there’s no place for me to go. Maybe I just don’t know how to make a commitment. Maybe the fact that I’m a gay rights supporter who drives an SUV and is against gun control, who doesn’t believe in God, who is an un-P.C. person that hates the NEA, who thinks faith based initiatives are wrong and the government should stay out of our bedrooms, who is no longer so gung ho about things in Iraq, means I should do some soul searching.

Or maybe it's not up to me where I go from here. What does your party or your candidate have to offer me? I'm up for grabs.

Save Our State Rally Against Home Depot Successful [Pics]

The Save Our State rally against Home Depot yesterday seemed to go off well. They were protesting Home Depot's support and work with La Raza, a group that is in support of returning the southwest states to Mexico. They were also protesting Home Depot's support and implementation of day labor facilities on their property for illegal aliens.

Home Depot Employed Rooftop Spotters

The rally went off well with 75 supporters showing up. While they didn't accomplish their goal of clogging up the whole store -- in effect shutting it down they did get Home Depot's attention. Home Depot had a large quantity of extra employee's on hand, had rooftop spotters, undercover agents and apparently even infiltrators who posed as protesters and reported to the store management on their actions and locations.

The protesters also got the media's attention as CNN's Lou Dobbs Show appeared with cameras and several papers showed up including the Los Angeles Times and The Daily Bulletin.

Save Our State

Earlier this week, Home Depot spokeswoman Kathryn Gallagher stated that she expected "business as usual" at their Rancho Cucamonga store in response to our demonstration.

Apparently, "business as usual" consists of placing spotters with walkie talkies and cameras on their rooftop, having "undercover" personnel film and follow various activists from our organization during the entire event. Business as usual also apparently consists of staffing the store with approximately 200 employees. There was nothing typical about Home Depot today.

Inside the store Home Depot had blocked off several aisles, had several employees stationed at the ends of each aisle and had two employees at each of the 15 registers.

Commenter SherriCorrell made this observation on the Save Our State message board after the protest.

It's astonishing how they brought in all the EXTRA people AS IF you, THE LEGAL U.S. TAXPAYING CITIZENS were the enemy INSTEAD OF THE ACTUAL ILLEGAL INVADERS.

What a sad state this country is in.

A sad state indeed when top retailers of our country openly support illegal aliens and the breaking of our country's laws.

See also my previous entry on this protest where there was some heated discussion.

Other Commentary On The Protest:

Michael Williams
faute de mieux
You've Been Told
Darleen's Place who lives down the street from this Home Depot and plans to shop at Lowe's from now on.

Originally posted at Diggers Realm

It was the strawberries ... the strawberries ..

The following editorial was written by Darleen Click and first appeared here. It is reprinted with permission of the author.

For good reason the blogsphere is rightfully alarmed by the threats coming from the FEC in regards to free speech on the Internet. Transcripts of the interview with FEC commissionar Bradley Smith can be found at Redstate.org.

She [Judge Koller-Cotella] orders us to regulate the Internet, again what I point out is — it is in no way limited to paid advertising. In fact, it would be contrary to the tone of the opinions limited only to paid advertising. In another part of the opinion, she struck down one of our regulations where we exempted unpaid advertising. So, I, you know, this was, it’s – it’s in no ways limited to unpaid advertising …

I note that we didn’t have enough votes to muster up an appeal of the judge’s decision, uh, on this particular issue, so obviously, uh, half of my colleagues [the 3 Democrats] at least feel that we should be doing more regulation of the Internet.

The McCain-Feingold Campaign “reform” bill was conceived and passed before I became a blogger. At that time, I posted on message boards, some on Yahoo!, where I argued vehemently against the bill as a direct assault on free speech. The idea that somehow if some speech could be defined as having “monetary value” then it could be regulated as “in-kind” contributions struck me, not as a noble exercise to keep so-called corruption out of elections, but as a fortification of the incumbents' ramparts against the challenging rabble. Indeed, the restrictions on all ads within the immediate time-period before an election is particularly egregious. Of course, one didn't see any particularly hard-hitting newspaper editorials opposing McCain-Feingold because such free-speech regulation reinforces the newspapers' traditional King-making power. Newspapers can still run their own editorial endorsements and, as we clearly saw in the last election, can slant their “news” coverage of the candidates in support of their editorial position.

The McCain-Feingold Incumbents Protection Act got its impetus during the 2000 campaign as John McCain railed, shrieked and gnashed his teeth over “dirty Texas money” financed independent ads sullying his sainted and clearly not-to-be-questioned record in Arizona. McCain was so incensed over individuals exercising their First Amendment rights on their own dime he figured it had to be a conspiracy that must be stopped. The MSM embraced the “maverick” McCain who's ostensible mantel of Republicanism allowed them to use his intemperate remarks and attacks on fellow Republicans as a figleaf for their own anti-Republican bent. They rarely questioned his red-faced podium pounding about “reforming” campaign “finances” and certainly didn't ask the tough questions on squaring the outright bans on “advocacy” with the First Amendment.

And now, in the wake of the 2004 elections and the success of the blogsphere, the sights of those who can't stand independent speech has been set upon the Internet and bloggers. The language of the McCain-Feingold used to piddle all over the Constitution in regards to “in-kind contributions” is being geared up as a firehose aimed at people who are using the Internet as a virtual townhall. It's not only Free Speech but Free Association that has arroused the continued ire of Capt. John McQueeg (as evidenced by his disingenuous attacks on the Swiftboat Vets who spoke out against John Kerry). For McQueeg and his fellow travelers in the FEC, people are allowed only to associate, trade information, debate the merits and demerits of issues and candidates when such activities ineffectual. There is little difference in kind between my advocacy speech in puting up a “Bush-Cheney 04” sign in my front yard and having the same graphic on my weblog. But McQueeg wants my weblog defined as a “monetary contribution.” If I host a cocktail party for 25 neighbors to share campaign literature I received from a presidential candidate or I send an email to 25 people in my address book with the same information, McQueeg wants the FEC to “regulate” the latter.

As long as us little-people know our place on the good ship [Mc]Caine, Cap'n John won't punish us.

I call bovine excrement. This is a direct assault on the Constitution. And I don't want to hear about “end runs” around the regulations that call for bloggers to have to do something to “qualify” as the press so they can get an exemption. I have the right under the First Amendment to Free Speech and Free Association. No one, no McQueeg, no Judge Koller-Cotella, no FEC Democrat can take that away. My blog is my own piece of virtual real estate and if I can have a sign on my lawn or a cocktail party in my house than I can damned well do the same thing here.

I will not be shutup or shutdown. The last thing all the McQueeg's want to fool with is a pre-menopausal woman. I just am in no mood to suffer such mendacity.

Others discussing the issue:

Jeff Harrell rightfully points out that the Federalist Papers (a series of public relation advocacy releases written under a :::gasp::: pen name) would have been banned under McCain-Feingold.

Capt. Ed writes an open letter here

LaShawn Barber notes that this issue unites bloggers across the political spectrum here.

Powerline has been running with this across several posts, the latest on how McQueeg's mouthpiece is trying to deceptively quiet the great unwashed bloggers.

Michelle Malkin posts a nice roundup of related links.

You know, hyperlinks which the FEC thinks represents in-kind “contributions”. Gosh, ya'think if I put a bunch of charity hyperlinks on my blog the IRS will let me deduct them as “in-kind” monetary contributions??

Of course, the irrepressible CITIZEN JOURNALIST weighs with a mini-manifesto and an update.

UPDATE Capt. Salty, while disclaiming any endorsement of McCain-Feingold, skates around the semantics of “advocacy” and “activism” while asking why shouldn't “activist” Screw-'em-Markos be regulated by campaign “finance” laws. Let me be perfectly clear and this is where my libertarian side (do notice the small “L”) comes to the fore. As long as all financial arrangements are disclosed and transparent, IMHO any further “regulation” of campaign “finances” are an assault on the First Amendment. Limiting MY ability to use MY money, whether it's for a backyard BBQ for Bush or a weblog for the Governator, is a direct contradiction of everything the Founding Fathers were thinking when they drew up the Constitution.

——

Darleen maintains a weblog about “parenting, politics and other prattlings” here.

Tom Ridge and... home improvement?

[Former DHS Secretary Tom] Ridge to join Home Depot board:

…”We are honored to have [Ridge] join our board, where we expect that his unique global experience and perspective will make a profound contribution to our company and our shareholders,” said Home Depot Chief Executive Bob Nardelli…

As covered at The Lonewacko Blog in the past (1 2 3 4 5…), Ridge was not exactly a good friend to those who believe that the U.S. has borders.

For its part, Home Depot has helped create several day laborer centers near its locations and, of course, many or most of those day laborers are illegal aliens.

Here's just one example:

The Home Depot contacted Catholic Charities and other social service nonprofits, the local police department, and city leaders, asking them to work together to create a solution that each part of the community felt good about and that included getting services to people who needed work. As a result, the group worked together to plan a new day laborer center, to be operated by Catholic Charities in conjunction with several social service and employment agencies. The store donated land across the street for the center and helped provide start-up funding. The city helped put up fencing and spread leaflets to day laborers throughout the area. The company, nonprofit, and city worked together to create a win-win solution for everyone…

Now, maybe this is not a payoff for his support of wide-open borders. Perhaps, as the first article discusses, it has something to do with the run on duct tape that Ridge caused…

The Last Warrior Standing

This Op/Ed was submitted by readers Mike Cohen & Elliot Chodoff.

~ Alan

*************************

An historic picture emanated from Sharm e-Sheikh this past week. For the first time in history, an Israeli leader sat down together with Arab leaders at an official, public and televised conference with no international mediators in sight, official or otherwise.

Everyone in the room, everyone in the picture, was a native of the region, a full-fledged resident of the Middle East. No Americans - although Sec. of State Condaleeza Rice was in the region yesterday, she wisely decided to absent herself from the meeting - no Europeans, no Russians and most importantly, no United Nations envoys attended or were invited. No one but the assorted plaintiffs was at the table, no external advocates or judges. The “bilateralism” David Ben Gurion dreamed of has finally arrived - if only for a day.

Left to their own devices the participants ventured into various renditions of the period to come. All the talk was of peace and hope, none of the past and nothing about recriminations. But more than talk there were quite a few historic images that are worthy of mention and note, above all the image of Ariel Sharon, the Prime Minister of Israel, sitting at an official Arab League table not only as an equal, not only as a messenger, but as a victor - The Last Warrior Standing - alone, with no recognizable faces behind him, save his lawyer and advisor Dov Weissglass.

Ben Gurion, Dayan, Golda, Begin - all gone. Peres and Shamir, alive but very noticeably (especially Peres) absent. No current, past or future colleagues or coalition partners anywhere in sight.

On the Arab side – all the kings, presidents and chairmen of yesteryear were gone. Hussein, Sadat, Assad, Nasser, and most importantly Yasser - all gone.

During a quick look around the room one could note that everyone was wearing a western style suit and tie. No leaders in uniform, no leaders with guns.

The entire road from the Sharm e-Sheikh airport to the resort hotel where the “Middle East Quartet” summit was being held was lined with the flags of the four nations, Egypt, Jordan, the Palestinian Authority and Israel.

The black, red and white of the regional Arabs flags mixed and provided sharp contrast to the bright blue and white Star of David, this had never happened before. The Israeli flag was noticeably absent from all previous events on Arab land, most notably on the streets of Aqaba during the U.S. sponsored summit there in June 2003 - the birthplace of “the roadmap.”

In the room itself, fittingly the same room that traditionally hosts the Arab Summit, the Israeli blue and white stood side by side with the banners of the three Arab participants, five flags of each stood proudly behind the host Mubarak, five flags each that added a sense of grandeur, of color and of historic accent to the event.

But the starkest image of all was still that of Ariel Sharon.

Ariel Sharon fought in every Israeli-Arab war, dating back to the 1948 War of Independence, and was a significant participant in the development of the Israeli Defense Forces as a commander and warrior.

Sharon was injured at Latrun in the battle over the road to Jerusalem in 1948. He led the battle against the Gaza-based Fedayeen terrorists in the 1950’s. Sharon was the commander who crossed the Suez Canal and arguably won the Sinai battle in 1973. Sharon directed the IDF in battle as minister of defense during the early 1980’s and was globally and domestically reviled and shunned for decades as the “butcher of Beirut.”

He was all but written off as a possible national leader until the fighting began in the fall of 2000, and Israeli political pundits have been prophesying his imminent fall from power since the day he took office in March 2001. Yet, there he was, quite literally The Last Warrior Standing.

Regardless of one's political orientation and personal feelings about Sharon; no matter what hopes or dangers we each foresee coming out of the Summit's proceedings; in fact no matter what happens tomorrow; if the old adage that the last man standing wins, Ariel Sharon is the last warrior standing and, at least for the day, he has emerged the big winner.

_______________________________________________________________

Mike Cohen, a native of Houston, Texas, is a veteran political & military strategist. He is the editor of “Where There Is No Vision, People Die,” (Proverbs 29:18), and “By Omission or Commission” a two-volume Middle-East Road-Map Primer for the 21st Century. Elliot Chodoff is a political and military analyst specializing in the Middle East conflict and the global war on terror. He has presented and published papers on the subjects of Deterrence and US Military Manpower Policy, Cultural Relativism and Nuclear Deterrence in the Middle East. His paper on Combat Motivation in Infantry Units is on the recommended reading list of the US Army War College. Both Cohen & Chodoff are currently based in Israel.

Tale of Two Mosques

Please examine these two ledes and then tell me the difference:

“THIRTEEN people were killed and 23 wounded today … [in a] mosque in the town of Balad Ruz, north-east of Baghdad”

”The death toll in a … Tehran mosque has risen to 59, a police official said Monday night”

The difference, of course, is the first story resulted from a terrorist car bombing while the second resulted from a fire. I ask, though, which received greater press exposure? At a certain level, both were preventable events, therefore making the greater distinction that of 13 dead, 29 wounded against 59 dead, 250 wounded.

Now, this commentary may be mistaken as being dismissive of the terrorists, a Pollyannish panglos of the dangers that yet stalk the Iraqi people. Rather, I hope it will be read as just an expression of exasperation that events in Iraq are so often presented as if they happen a vacuum, that Iraq is all death and gloom while the rest of the world, untroubled by American intervention, lives in peaceful idylic bliss. Long after the terrorists' teeth in Iraq have been pulled I'm sure mosques will be burning down because of unsafe heating practices.

Yes, it's important to accurately communicate problems and challenges in Iraq, but it is only responsible to present them with perspective and understanding their true relative importance.

The Rhetoric of Ronald Reagan

Yesterday was Ronald Reagan's birthday. My views on Reagan are, well, complex (and probably a bit conflicted). But his birthday reminded me of a post I wrote on my old and now dormant blog, Avocare, around the time of his death. I repost it here for those who admired the power of Reagan's words.

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Confidence

When I was 17 or so, I was ranting about some piece of US foreign policy when my father looked at me with level eyes and said, “Buddy, if you’re not a liberal when you’re 18 you got no heart, and if you’re not a conservative by the time you're 28 you got no brain.”

Reagan was president then, and I was not a big fan. Now that I’m well into my mid-30s (“middle aged,” my wife says), I’ve come to appreciate and admire Reagan. He was the essential optimist at a time in which America desperately needed optimism. At a time when Jimmy Carter was telling us we should be confident, Reagan gave us reasons to be confident, and led the way through his own confidence and optimism. Many presidents have spoken of the shining city on the hill; Reagan truly believed in it.

I’ve also come to admire Reagan for his fundamental belief in the power of rhetoric … rhetoric in the classical sense, not the current and bastardized sense of double talk by evasive politicians. Reagan understood and respected the power of his words, and he understood better than anyone since FDR (yes, better than Kennedy) the power of presidential discourse in making great things possible.

Reagan has six speeches listed in American Rhetoric’s list of the 100 most significant American political speeches of the 20th century (the list was complied by two professors of Rhetoric and Communication, who asked 137 leading scholars of American public address to recommend speeches on the basis of social and political impact, and rhetorical artistry):

• The “A Time for Choosing” speech, 1964
• His first inaugural address (the “Putting America Back to Work” speech)
• The “Evil Empire” speech, 1983
• The “Boys of Pointe du Hoc” speech, 40th D-Day anniversary, 1984
• The “Space Shuttle Challenger” address, 1986
• The “Tear Down This Wall” speech, 1987

Only FDR and JFK have as many on the list. Some people, though, try to taint Reagan’s oratory as less substantive than some of his predecessors. These people remember him as the Actor President, noting with a curled lip that Reagan was all sizzle and no steak. But they forget that his most noted speeches were policy speeches wrapped in soaring oratory, and not soaring oratory alone.

Let’s take them one at a time.

The Time for Choosing speech, a campaign address in support of Barry Goldwater during the 1964 campaign, is actually in speech in which Reagan outlines what would become the Republican agenda 20 years later: the importance of small government over large, of empowering individuals to pursue their own interests, and of preserving America as “the last best hope for man on Earth” through winning the Cold War. He said that day:

You and I know and do not believe that life is so dear and peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery. If nothing in life is worth dying for, when did this begin—just in the face of this enemy? Or should Moses have told the children of Israel to live in slavery under the pharaohs? Should Christ have refused the cross? Should the patriots at Concord Bridge have thrown down their guns and refused to fire the shot heard 'round the world? The martyrs of history were not fools, and our honored dead who gave their lives to stop the advance of the Nazis didn't die in vain. Where, then, is the road to peace? Well, it's a simple answer after all.

You and I have the courage to say to our enemies, “There is a price we will not pay.” There is a point beyond which they must not advance. This is the meaning in the phrase of Barry Goldwater's “peace through strength.” Winston Churchill said that “the destiny of man is not measured by material computation. When great forces are on the move in the world, we learn we are spirits—not animals.” And he said, “There is something going on in time and space, and beyond time and space, which, whether we like it or not, spells duty.”

You and I have a rendezvous with destiny. We will preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on Earth, or we will sentence them to take the last step into a thousand years of darkness.

The “Putting America Back to Work” speech is remembered first as an eloquent and vital inaugural address, but in it Reagan declared his intentions to reduce the size of the federal government, return power to the states, reduce taxes, strengthen the country’s ties with its allies, and act with force in the world if required. This speech also closes with these lines, some of the greatest presidential rhetoric ever spoken:

This is the first time in our history that this ceremony has been held, as you’ve been told, on this West Front of the Capitol.

Standing here, one faces a magnificent vista, opening up on this city’s special beauty and history. At the end of this open mall are those shrines to the giants on whose shoulders we stand. Directly in front of me, the monument to a monumental man. George Washington, father of our country. A man of humility who came to greatness reluctantly. He led America out of revolutionary victory into infant nationhood. Off to one side, the stately memorial to Thomas Jefferson. The Declaration of Independence flames with his eloquence. And then beyond the Reflecting Pool, the dignified columns of the Lincoln Memorial. Whoever would understand in his heart the meaning of America will find it in the life of Abraham Lincoln.

Beyond those moments, monuments to heroism is the Potomac River, and on the far shore the sloping hills of Arlington National Cemetery with its row upon row of simple white markers bearing crosses or Stars of David. They add up to only a tiny fraction of the price that has been paid for our freedom.

Each on of those markers is a monument to the kind of hero I spoke of earlier. Their lives ended in places called Belleau Wood, the Argonne, Omaha Beach, Salerno and halfway around the world on Guadalcanal, Tarawa, Pork Chop Hill, the Chosin Reservoir, and in a hundred rice paddies and jungles of a place called Vietnam. Under such a marker lies a young man, Martin Treptow, who left his job in a small town barber shop in 1917 to go to France with the famed Rainbow Division.

There, on the Western front, he was killed trying to carry a message between battalions under heavy fire.

We are told that on his body was found a diary. On the flyleaf under the heading, “My Pledge,” he had written these words: “America must win this war. Therefore I will work, I will save, I will sacrifice, I will endure, I will fight cheerfully and do my utmost, as if the issue of the whole struggle depended on me alone.”

The crisis we are facing today does not require of us the kind of sacrifice that Martin Treptow and so many thousands of others were called upon to make. It does require, however, our best effort, and our willingness to believe in ourselves and to believe in our capacity to perform great deeds; to believe that together with God’s help we can and will resolve the problems which now confront us.

And after all, why shouldn’t we believe that? We are Americans.

Compare those words to these from Carter’s “Crisis of Confidence” speech …

We are at a turning point in our history. There are two paths to choose. One is a path I’ve warned about tonight, the path that leads to fragmentation and self-interest. Down that road lies a mistaken idea of freedom, the right to grasp for ourselves some advantage over others. That path would be one of constant conflict between narrow interests ending in chaos and immobility. It is a certain route to failure.

All the traditions of our past, all the lessons of our heritage, all the promises of our future point to another path — the path of common purpose and the restoration of American values. That path leads to true freedom for our nation and ourselves. We can take the first steps down that path as we begin to solve our energy problem.

Energy will be the immediate test of our ability to unite this nation, and it can also be the standard around which we rally. On the battlefield of energy we can win for our nation a new confidence, and we can seize control again of our common destiny.

The answer to America’s crisis of confidence is … energy policy? Compare these two speeches and the difference between telling Americans to be confident and giving them a reason for confidence should be clear.

I vividly remember the Evil Empire speech, and in particular I remember thinking “this maniac is trying to get us all killed.” But what Reagan was doing in this speech before evangelical Christians was sending a message to the Soviets that the policy of the United States would not be one of a nuclear freeze … that to do so would reward the USSR for its military buildup. Reagan knew the Soviets supported a freeze because it would freeze their military advantage, and more important, would free their economy from an arms race they could not afford. In this speech he was letting the Soviets know he knew, and that he wasn’t going to fall for it.

We will never give away our freedom. We will never abandon our belief in God. And we will never stop searching for a genuine peace. But we can assure none of these things America stands for through the so-called nuclear freeze solutions proposed by some.

The truth is that a freeze now would be a very dangerous fraud, for that is merely the illusion of peace. The reality is that we must find peace through strength.

I would agree to a freeze if only we could freeze the Soviets' global desires. A freeze at current levels of weapons would remove any incentive for the Soviets to negotiate seriously in Geneva and virtually end our chances to achieve the major arms reductions which we have proposed. Instead, they would achieve their objectives through the freeze.

A freeze would reward the Soviet Union for its enormous and unparalleled military buildup. It would prevent the essential and long overdue modernization of United States and allied defenses and would leave our aging forces increasingly vulnerable. And an honest freeze would require extensive prior negotiations on the systems and numbers to be limited and on the measures to ensure effective