Michael Totten, at Tech Central Station;

It’s bad enough that the torchbearers of Political Correctness compromised their honorable anti-racist principles with expediency and hypocrisy. But what’s left of Political Correctness is worse even than that. There’s also something implicitly racist about it. White Christians are held to the highest possible standard. They’re expected not to have a racist thought in their heads and are called out for the slightest infraction. Culprits who really are racist (and who aren’t merely guilty of checking the “wrong” box on their voter registration) deserve all the shellacking they get. Meanwhile, however, ethnic and religious minorities are allowed to behave like skinheads. It looks as though the activist set expects hatemongering anti-social behavior from Muslim immigrants just as they expect a dog to pee on the rug. It’s the “soft bigotry of low expectations” with a racial twist.

Read the “Berkeley Intifada”.

Pejman Yousefzadeh on the millionth Bloomingdale’s customer.

Watching the ceremonies today on Juno Beach, I wonder how many of us were uncomfortable with the juxtaposition of commemorations being led by Liberal politicians whose policies have been responsible for the evisceration of the Canadian military over the past 30 years.
Nicholas Packwood says it best.“Bring back this Canada.”

Bagpipes played their eerie sound as the Royal Highland Regiment left the harbour in England. They played the pipes on the transports as they rocked up the shore. They bagpipes howled as the Black Watch hit Juno Beach. The bagpipes gave a simple message to the Germans defending Juno beach: we are crazy, we are coming, and you are going to die.

Mr. Martin – I hope you and your Liberal government members and your social engineering, leftist career beaurocrats looked long and hard into the faces of those elderly veterans today.
For every one of them is twice the man of the lot of you combined.

“In the 1950s, Khrushchev predicted: “We will bury you.” But in the West today, we see a free world that has achieved a level of prosperity and well-being unprecedented in all human history. In the Communist world, we see failure, technological backwardness, declining standards of health, even want of the most basic kind–too little food. Even today, the Soviet Union still cannot feed itself. After these four decades, then, there stands before the entire world one great and inescapable conclusion: Freedom leads to prosperity. Freedom replaces the ancient hatreds among the nations with comity and peace. Freedom is the victor.
And now the Soviets themselves may, in a limited way, be coming to understand the importance of freedom. We hear much from Moscow about a new policy of reform and openness. Some political prisoners have been released. Certain foreign news broadcasts are no longer being jammed. Some economic enterprises have been permitted to operate with greater freedom from state control.
Are these the beginnings of profound changes in the Soviet state? Or are they token gestures, intended to raise false hopes in the West, or to strengthen the Soviet system without changing it? We welcome change and openness; for we believe that freedom and security go together, that the advance of human liberty can only strengthen the cause of world peace. There is one sign the Soviets can make that would be unmistakable, that would advance dramatically the cause of freedom and peace.
General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization: Come here to this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”

Rest In Peace, Mr. Reagan. And thankyou.
Outside The Beltway has a roundup of photos and links.
Dean Esmay;
“I hated him when he was President.
Now I’m a 38 year-old man who can’t stop crying.
And that’s the truth.”
Kathy Shaidle remembers when she stopped hating him, too. “It’s too late to say I’m sorry, but not to say that he was right about a lot of things and I was wrong.”
Wretchard, at the Belmont Club;
“The man who won Cold War died today. He couldn’t take it with him, but left his legacy to billions of human beings. He was characterized as an idiot, an automaton and charlatan by many of his critics. Yet none of his detractors, however polished and poised, have changed the world so profoundly as this one man.”

Bill Whittle .

I, and others who see a terrible threat in the growth of Radical Islam, did not invent this term. It is considerably older than my humble self; besides, I do not speak Arabic. It is their term. And unlike people determined to hide until this problem goes away, I am determined to take Islam at its word.
Finally, consider this: Muslims are angrily at war with Buddhists in East Asia. Muslims are at enraged with Animists in Africa. Of course, none of this approaches the sheer hatred that Muslims bear towards Hindus in the South Asia peninsula. And this foaming hatred blanches compared to the white-hot fury Muslims feel to the Christian American Crusaders. And this fury is but a candle to the incandescent, boiling, supernova of murder they feel toward the Jews.
Does anyone beside me detect a pattern here? You know, my Dad told me once, “Bill, if more than three people in your life are utter, total assholes, then maybe it’s you.”
I am not a religious person. I do not have a horse in this race. But everywhere I turn in the world today, I see Radical Islam – – and not the United States — at war with everybody. And I have no choice but to conclude that this is not a blip or a hiccup. It is a growing threat. And it needs to be met head-on. Right now.

And for our apologist friends;

The truly remarkable, astonishing and galling issue here is that while the multi-culturalists are the ones shrieking the loudest about understanding different people and different values, they are the ones absolutely least willing to take themselves at their own words and so they consistently apply western thought models to people who think nothing like we do.

It’s long, and worth your time.

Thomas Lifson has his suspicions about what may be going on behind the scenes of UNSCAM.
If true, I suspect it isn’t the first time – there was a rather sudden reversal of position from France, Germany and Russia over their initial refusal to forgive Iraq’s debts a few months ago – despite the warnings of the pundits and political critics who said the exclusion of those countries from bidding on lucrative rebuilding contracts was a self-inflicted foot wound.
Via Instapundit, who as usual, has a great roundup of links

Sean at Pol:Spy compares gasoline prices to HP printer ink costs. I’m sort of on the same page as he is.

I get around 12 mpg in my 86 Dodge pickup. As inefficient as that is, I cannot justify replacing it with a newer, fuel efficient car. And I’ve looked into it.

Why not? It’s paid for, and costs 41$ a month to insure. Occassional repairs are part of the deal, but they are inexpensive as repairs go, and used parts are available if need be. The original cost in buying it used ($5K) 5 years ago, and then replacing the engine ($3K) – far less than buying a new or newer car or truck would have been. I don’t think twice about its reliability before taking it to Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Chicago.
The actual cost of a newer vehicle in payments, depreciation and insurance more than eat up any fuel savings, and when you live on a budget in which you have no idea from month to month what your income is going to be – that’s an issue.
And then there’s this: if you think that paying $90 to drive a full size pickup the 6 hours from Saskatoon to Calgary is expensive – try mailing it instead.

Iraq the Model describes the new life of an Iraq soldier.

Jay Currie spotted this contrasting AIDS story in Asia.

AIDS victims in 1987: Philippines 135 / Thailand 112
In 1991 the WHO predicted the Philippines would have 80,000 to 90,000 cases and Thailand 60,000 to 80,000 AIDS victims.
Thailand promoted the use of condoms in massive campaigns where Catholic Philippines promoted “Abstinence” and “Be faithful”.
The prognosis of the WHO was wrong for both countries:
1999: Philippines 1,005 / Thailand 755,000 AIDS victims.

Jaeger, on the already-wearing-thin Iraqi Prison Scandal Outrage[tm];

Bush could haul Rumsfeld out in public and do a Daniel Pearl on him, offering up his head on a silver platter to be used in the next soccer game in Fallujah and the opponents would say it’s not enough. He could it follow that up and commit hari-kari on Al-Jazeera and they’d say he took the easy way out, and anyway Wolfowitz is still pulling the strings so nothings changes. So forget about the public relations and just do what’s necessary to restore discipline, punish the guilty and get on with it.

I would like to apologize too. For Global Warning.
Today, I watched and gave useless advice to a friend as he lay underneath my 1986 Dodge pickup (which averages 12 miles per gallon) as he used a jackknife to cut a hanging bracket to release a goodly portion of my exhaust system.
So, I guess I’m sorry about that.
But it’s not like it’s really loud or anything, so it will do for now. And it’s not nearly as bad as the bike.

For those Canadian readers who aren’t familiar with the scandal finally being dragged into the light of day, involving UN complicity and exploitation of the Iraq Oil-For-Food debacle, this article outlines it quite neatly.

The short version of the Oil-for-Food scandal is that the U.N. let Saddam Hussein draw up his own rules, contacts, and business deals. Then U.N. then did all it could to either cover up the transactions and accounts, or worse, allow Hussein to operate without any real supervision at all. The program, whose intentions were supposed to be humanitarian, ended up empowering Saddam Hussein with both money and influence while the U.N. was paid a handsome commission by Saddam to ‘supervise’.

This past weekend I mentioned it to a number of my friends. They did not know there is a scandal at all. Not surprising with the low priority it’s recieved on the pro-UN Canadian airwaves.

With such a lucrative scheme at stake three members of the U.N. Security Council — Russia, France, and China — asked only that the program be expanded. So how did it work and why was it so lucrative to these nations?
Rosett, writing this time in Commentary magazine, says, “It worked like this. Saddam would sell at below-market prices to his hand- picked customers — the Russians and the French were special favorites — and they could then sell the oil to third parties at a fat profit. Part of this profit they would keep, part they would kick back to Saddam as a ‘surcharge,’ paid into bank accounts outside the UN program, in violation of UN sanctions.”

James Joyner distills current Bush administration criticism down to the bare essentials: “Damned if You Do…”

Watching several of the Sunday morning talk shows, I’ve noticed two themes:
The Bush Administration didn’t do enough with sketchy pieces of intelligence that al Qaeda was going to do something, somewhere, at some time and is therefore responsible for not preventing the 9/11 attacks.
The Bush Administration relied too heavily on now-discredited intelligence that Saddam Hussein was ramping up WMD production and used it to launch a war before we were attacked.

But of course, this is far too black and white an analysis.
A more sophisticated president would have understood the complexities of the history and culture of the Middle East, and made reparations for past insults to Islam.
A true diplomat would have negotiated the peaceful retirement of Saddam, with seats on the UN Human Rights Committee for his sons, and disarmed and rehabilitated the Fedayeen. This would have freed the Iraqis from the chokehold of the “US” sanctions, removing their troops from Saudi Arabia and the no-fly zone, thereby avoiding intelligence altogether.
See? Is that so hard?

Greg Easterbrook points out the obvious, and does a masterful job of it.

On August 7, 2001, Bush had ordered the United States military to stage an all-out attack on alleged terrorist camps in Afghanistan. Thousands of U.S. special forces units parachuted into this neutral country, while air strikes targeted the Afghan government and its supporting military. Pentagon units seized abandoned Soviet air bases throughout Afghanistan, while establishing support bases in nearby nations such as Uzbekistan. Simultaneously, FBI agents throughout the United States staged raids in which dozens of men accused of terrorism were taken prisoner.
Reaction was swift and furious. Florida Senator Bob Graham said Bush had “brought shame to the United States with his paranoid delusions about so-called terror networks.” British Prime Minister Tony Blair accused the United States of “an inexcusable act of conquest in plain violation of international law.” White House chief counterterrorism advisor Richard Clarke immediately resigned in protest of “a disgusting exercise in over-kill.”

Read it all. It will make you laugh – and cry .

Jeff Goldstein contends that Canadian prisons have been “Oprah-fied”.
Does Oprah really golf? Ron Wiebe – Warden, Ferndale Institution

The golf course that we built at Ferndale has become a focal point for criticism, if people need a target. It became a major feature for those who wanted to highlight the issue about attractiveness and comfort.
…
The other major criticism came when we began exploring the possibility of opening up a driving range. There was support from the people in Mission, but not a lot of support from one of the driving-range operators in Abbotsford.

He also has interesting things to say about the “politics of escape”. They’re missing a couple of suspected murderers, but as time passes, it looks like they won’t be charged, so – no harm, no foul!

Douglas Hansen, at the American Thinker, has an article that examines the strange locations of barrels of “pesticides” found by WMD teams in Iraq, and questions why such discoveries have been dismissed.

Specifically, the DIA noted that Baghdad had rebuilt segments of its industrial chemical infrastructure under the “guise of a civilian need for pesticides, chlorine, and other legitimate chemical products.”� Pesticides are the key elements in the chemical agent arena.� In fact, the general pesticide chemical formula (organophosphate) is the “grandfather” of modern day nerve agents.� Pesticides are also precursors of many other chemical weapons including Mustard-Lewisite (HL), Phosgene (CG) a choking agent, and Hydrogen Cyanide (AC) a blood agent.�
It was not surprising then, as Coalition forces attacked into Iraq, that huge warehouses and caches of “commercial and agricultural” chemicals were seized and painstakingly tested by Army and Marine chemical specialists.� What was surprising was how quickly the ISG refuted the findings of our ground forces, and how silent they have been on the significance of these caches.
…
One of the reported incidents occurred near Karbala where there appeared to be a very large “agricultural supply” area of 55-gallon drums of pesticide.� In addition, there was also a camouflaged bunker complex full of these drums that some people entered with unpleasant results.� More than a dozen soldiers, a Knight-Ridder reporter, a CNN cameraman, and two Iraqi POWs came down with symptoms consistent with exposure to nerve agent.� A full day of tests on the drums resulted in one positive for nerve agent, and then one resulted in a negative.� Later, an Army Fox NBC [nuclear, biological, chemical] Recon Vehicle confirmed the existence of Sarin.� An officer from the 63d Chemical Company thought there might well be chemical weapons at the site.�
But later ISG tests resulted in a proclamation of negative, end of story, nothing to see here, etc., and the earlier findings and injuries dissolved into non-existence. Left unexplained is the small matter of the obvious pains taken to disguise the cache of ostensibly legitimate pesticides. One wonders about the advantage an agricultural commodities business gains by securing drums of pesticide in camouflaged bunkers six feet underground.� The “agricultural site” was also co- located with a military ammunition dump, evidently nothing more than a coincidence in the eyes of the ISG.
…
Then in January of this year, Danish forces discovered 120mm mortar shells with a mysterious liquid inside that initially tested positive for blister agents.� Further tests in Southern Iraq and in the US were, of course, negative.� The Danish Army said, “It is unclear why the initial field tests were wrong.”� This is the understatement of the year, and also points to a most basic question: If it wasn’t a chemical agent, what was it?� More pesticides?� Dishwashing detergent?� From this old soldier’s perspective, I gain nothing from putting a liquid in my mortar rounds unless that stuff will do bad things to the enemy.

Read the whole thing.
hat tip – Occam’s Toothbrush

“In the contemporary world, the world of human rights, when you call a person a right-winger, this is the first step toward his or her delegitimization. ”

But I soon noticed that I had lost the innocence of the good Jew, of the very special Jewish friend, their Jew: I was now connected with the Jews of the State of Israel, and slowly I was put out of the dodecaphonic, psychoanalytic, Bob Dylan, Woody Allen, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Philip Roth, Freud shtetl, the coterie that sanctified my Judaism in left wing eyes.
I have tried for a long time to bring back that sanctification, and they tried to give it back to me, because we desperately needed each other, the left and the Jews. But today’s anti Semitism has overwhelmed any good intention.
…
The Left blessed the Jews as the victim “par excellence,” always a great partner in the struggle for the rights of the weak against the wicked. In return for being coddled, published, filmed, considered artists, intellectuals and moral judges, Jews, even during the Soviet anti- Semitic persecutions, gave the Left moral support and invited it to cry with them at Holocaust memorials. Today the game is clearly over. The left has proved itself the real cradle of contemporary anti-Semitism.
…
Why is the war on terrorism often looked upon as a strategic problem that the world still must solve (look at the US war against Afghanistan and Iraq) and Israel is treated like a guilty defendant for fighting it? Is it not anti-Semitism, when you act as if Jews must die quietly? Why is Israel officially accused by the human rights commission in Geneva of violating human rights, while, China, Libya, Sudan, have never ever been accused? Why has Israel been denied a fixed place in regional groups in the UN while Syria sits in the Security Council? Why can everybody join a war against Iraq except Israel, despite the fact that Saddam has always threatened Israel with complete destruction? When sovereign states and organizations threaten death to Israel, why does nobody raise the question at the UN? Has Italy been threatened by France or Spain like those Iranian leaders who openly say that they will destroy Israel with an atomic bomb? And what is said when a large part of the world newspapers, TV, radio and school textbooks recommend kicking the Jews out of Israel and killing them all over the world using terrorist bombers? The international community doesn’t consider this a problem. Israel is an “unterstate”, denied the basic rights of every other state, to exist in honor and peace. The Jewish state is not equal.

Converting bad leaders into dead saints

As everyone knows, the Middle East suffers from bad leadership. We have number of aging, corrupt and undemocratic leaders who represent extremist ideas. Until now, these gentleman have proven to be insuperable obstacles to peace, democracy, progress and improvements of the well-being of the populace. However, Middle East innovation and ingenuity have now come up with a solution. Any fanatic, illogical, corrupt or bloodthirsty leader can be instantly converted into a revered saint and martyr by assassination.

Go read the rest.

The Belmont Club has a wealth of analysis on the fallout from the extermination of Yassin and the subsequent destabilization of Hamas.

The frenzy in the Gaza strip tonight probably has less to do with the preparations to strike back at Israel then a frantic attempt to locate the secret bank account numbers that Sheik Yassin may have had in his possession.

And this –

Before this is over the world will have had a bellyful of war. Each morning’s unbearable news will cast the net wider. Neither the man commuting to work in Central Madrid nor the peace marchers in costume on Market Street can escape being combatants. Leftist sympathies, whether in Israel, America or Europe will prove no armor against car bomb fragments. War was Osama Bin Laden’s goal in attacking the United States on September 11. He hoped to force America into fruitless and ineffectual reprisals against the Islamic world, then offer a hudna at intervals while he prepared his next blow. George Bush’s counterstroke, which history will either judge as an act of supreme folly or genius, was to go beyond Afghanistan into Iraq. In a worthy riposte to Osama’s, he escalated the struggle to the point where it was mutually mortal. If the fall of the Twin Towers was a gauntlet in America’s face, the fall of Baghdad was a glove shoved down the Islamist’s throat. Both Bin Laden and Bush have made compromise impossible. If the jihadis believed they could control the tempo of the conflict they were misinformed; American forces in the Arab heartland have forced a zugzwang to compel the game to the bitter end.

IMAO – Bite Sized Wisdom

Protection on the Slopes: So Kerry was skiing in Idaho (Idaho! I don’t care how much he skis; he ain’t winning that state), and then fall downs when he runs into a Secret Service agent. Then he exclaims, “I don’t fall down!” and uses and expletive to describe the Secret Service Agent. Makes him seem a wee bit haughty. And why is the Secret Service skiing with him anyway? Why can’t they just post snipers to watch Kerry? Then, if a Secret Service agent caused Kerry to crash, Kerry would have a better excuse.
“I don’t fall; that son of a bitch shot me!”
And then you’d hear up in the trees, “My bad.”*