Odierno Tells Senate U.S. Military Headed in Right Direction in Iraq

The United States “is not out of the woods yet” in Iraq, but the nation is headed in the right direction, the man nominated to be the next Multinational Force Iraq commander said today.

Odierno, who served as Multinational Corps Iraq commander until October 2007, said Iraq has made significant progress, specifically over the past 18 months. “I believe a self-reliant government of Iraq that is stable, one that is committed to governance and protecting its own people and serving all its people, a place that's denied as a safe haven for terrorists and extremists and one that is integrated into the international community and a partner of the war on terror is absolutely possible in Iraq,” he said. “And I think it's closer today than it has been.”

Odierno told the senators that he would not make sweeping pronouncements about Iraq, but he did say that, generally, the increased capability of the Iraqi security forces has been extremely important to progress here.

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The Airline Bomb Plot

[that was so nearly the 'Airline Bomb-ing']

...Here's another hypothetical: Would this conversation be different today if in August 2006 seven airliners had taken off from Terminal 3 at Heathrow Airport, bound for the U.S. and Canada and each carrying about 250 passengers, and then blew up over the Atlantic Ocean? [snip]

The view that 9/11 "changed everything" did not hold up under the weight of our politics. Divisions re-emerged between Democrats and Republicans, in office and on the streets. These fights reignited over the Patriot Act, Guantanamo and the warrantless wiretap bill (or "FISA" revision). These arguers stopped to stare momentarily at their televisions when Islamic terrorists succeeded in mass murder in the 2004 Madrid train bombing and the 2005 London subway bombing, but quickly returned to partisan grandstanding... [snip]

The arrests of the men [before they could execute their crime {suicide bombers are not deterable, they must be interdicted}] was the result of broad and prolonged surveillance. For months, the suspects were bugged, photographed and wiretapped. Here in the U.S., our politics has spent much of the year unable to vote into law the wiretap bill, which is bogged down, incredibly, over giving retrospective legal immunity to telecom companies that helped the government monitor calls - originating overseas...[snip]

Philip Bobbitt, author of the just released and thought-provoking book, "Terror and Consent," has written that court warrants are "a useful standard for surveillance designed to prove guilt, not to learn the identity of people who may be planning atrocities."

Planning atrocities is precisely the point.

[Recommended >]

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Canada's 'Human Rights' Inquisition Comes After Stein

Typically one does not associate the word inquisition with our neighbors up north in Canada, and yet that is pretty much what is going on there to conservative author and columnist Mark Steyn. Minus the violence, Steyn is being subjected to a twisted court system that always finds defendants guilty and conducts itself in an utterly capricious way.

Steyn's crime? Daring to criticize radical Islam. For his temerity, Steyn and the Canadian magazine Maclean's (which printed Steyn's essay, an excerpt from his book) are being put on trial by the "human rights commission" of British Columbia, one of several such bodies both Steyn and Maclean's have been forced to deal with by the Canadian Islamic Congress.

What to do about this outrage? The editors at National Review have a few suggestions...

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NBC Claimed Bush Allowed Al-Qaeda in Iraq Before War, Media Now Ignore Pre-War Presence

[HT:MS]
While it is currently conventional wisdom in the media that there was no Al-Qaeda presence in Iraq before the 2003 invasion, as evidenced by the media's failure to correct Barack Obama's recent claim that "there was no such thing as Al-Qaeda in Iraq until George Bush and John McCain decided to invade Iraq."

In fact, four years ago, the NBC Nightly News claimed not only that there was an Al-Qaeda presence in Iraq before the invasion, busy plotting attacks against Europe, but that the Bush administration intentionally "passed up several opportunities" to attack terrorist bases in Iraq "long before the war" in 2002 because of fear it would "undercut its case" for overthrowing Saddam Hussein. (Transcripts follow)

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Irish voters reject EU power grab

The Treaty of Lisbon, in effect a new constitution for the European Union intended to add to the power of EU bureaucrats at the expense of democratically elected national governments, was rejected by Irish voters yesterday. Predictably, the New York Times is disappointed. [snip]

"I think the Irish prime minister, Brian Cowen, will have to explain himself at the summit." [?]

The arguments used to advocate the treaty to Irish voters betray a mentality common to welfare states: we subsidized you, so now give us political power... [snip]

In fact, as many observers have noted, the key to Ireland's stunning economic growth the last two decades was not EU subsidies (handed out to countries that are poorer than the EU average - welfare, in other words), but rather radical tax cuts and deregulation, which ignited the "Celtic tiger" phenomenon, propelling the Irish to genuine prosperity. Benjamin Powell of the Goldwater Institute explains: [see piece for list of impressive stats > ][snip]

Apparently the Irish voters, having learned from their experience with a low taxes and reasonable regulation, are not anxious to return to a system premised on the notion that bureaucrats must regulate everything in detail, and taxes must be high.

Needless to say, the EU will press on with its power grab, regardless of voters' wishes...

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Thabo Mbeki blocks UN Zimbabwe agenda

Harare - The horrors of Zimbabwe's political violence will not feature on the agenda of the UN Security Council meeting overnight after South African President Thabo Mbeki blocked an attempt to put the crisis on the program.

The Security Council will now discuss only the humanitarian situation in Zimbabwe, separating it from the ongoing political violence in the lead-up to the presidential runoff. (Snip) The US and Britain were furious with South Africa's block at the UN, achieved with Russia's help...

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Study: UN Global Warming Forecast Violates Accepted Principles

"These dire predictions are not the result of scientific forecasting," said J. Scott Armstrong, an internationally known expert in forecasting methods from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania who co-authored the NCPA study. "Rather, they are opinions derived from a political process."

The most accepted forecasting methods were determined by internationally-known experts and expert reviewers and are available in the Principles of Forecasting handbook. These principles were designed to be applicable to making forecasts about diverse physical, social and economic phenomena. The NCPA study applied these forecasting principles to audit 2007's Fourth Assessment Report of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which predicted big increases in average world temperature by 2100. The audit found that:

• Out of 140 forecasting principles, 127 are relevant to the procedures used to arrive at the climate projections in the IPCC report;
• Of these, the IPCC report clearly violated almost half (60);
• An additional 12 forecasting principles appear to be violated, and there is insufficient information in the report to assess the use of 38 others; therefore
• Only 17 out of 127 applicable forecasting principles can be shown to have been followed by the IPCC.

The authors also note that the IPCC forecasters themselves are part of the unreliability problem, as political considerations influenced all stages of the IPCC process, including writing the final version expressly to reflect the language negotiated by the political appointees to the IPCC.

"As a result of these violations of forecasting principles, the forecasts in the IPCC report are invalid," says Armstrong. "There is no scientific forecast supporting the widespread belief in dangerous human-caused ‘global warming.' In fact, it has yet to be demonstrated that long-term forecasting of climate is possible at all."

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Oil companies spend more on taxes than on oil supply development

... Over the last several the major oil companies have been driven away from investing money in future exploration and production. The so-called Supermajors, Exxon, BP, Shell, Chevron. Conoco, and Total have paid more in taxes than they have invested in the oil business. For the three year period, 2005 to 2007 these companies have paid $292 billion in taxes and invested $265 billion in capital projects... [snip]

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Sarkozy proposes EU cut in fuel tax

[HT:PS]
Paris - President Nicolas Sarkozy of France on Tuesday proposed cutting fuel taxes Europe-wide, responding to economic discontent that has prompted French fishermen to mount protests now spreading to other European shores and sectors. Sarkozy urged the European Union to suspend part of the value-added tax on fuel to counter rising crude oil prices that have risen repeatedly to new highs in recent weeks. For more than two weeks, angry fishermen have blocked ports across France to protest rising fuel prices...

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A Supreme Error

Upon reading the opinion in Boumediene v Bush, one must conclude that the majority knew where they wanted to go and simply had to figure out how to get there. The trip was not a pretty one.

How could it be when the justices seemingly wrote a map based on ideas cherry picked from over 400 years of established law and backfilled with justifications to create a new right for alien combatants that Americans themselves do not enjoy?

...as Justice Scalia pointed out in his dissent – they for the first time in our nation’s history, conferred a Constitutional right of habeas corpus on alien enemies detained abroad by our military forces in the course of an ongoing war – a broader right than has been given to our own citizens. The court majority did so acknowledging that they could find no precedent to confer such a right to alien enemies not within sovereign U.S. territory...

...It is truly stunning that this court has seen fit to arrogate unto itself a role in the most important issue facing any country, self-defense, in a case in which Congress has in fact repeatedly acted. This was not a case where Congress did not set the rules; it did. But the court still decided – in the face of overwhelming precedent to the contrary – to intervene...

I also find it just a tad ironic that in a case involving habeas corpus, which literally means that one must produce a body (or person) before a court to explain the basis on which that person is being detained, the decision of this court may mean more fallen bodies in the defense of a Constitution some of these justices ignored...

People can disagree over whether Congress got it right, but at least members have to face the voters. What remedy do people have now if they don’t like the court’s decision? None. If that thought is not enough to cause concerned citizens to turn out on Election Day to elect a new president, then I don’t know what will be.

[we've a legal-system crisis in this country that must be addressed]

[Recommended > ]

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Let’s Get Something Straight

[HT:MN]
I liked Tim Russert, even though I thought his BS gotcha nonsense was thorough idiocy and not helping the debate at all. He was a likable guy- friendly, always smiling. I understand it is a loss for the beltway folks, and he had a lot of really good friends and meant a lot to people, and I would be dishonest if I failed to mention that I feel sad by his passing.

But let’s get something straight- what I am watching right now on the cable news shows is indicative of the problem- no clearer demonstration of the fact that they consider themselves to be players and the insiders and, well, part of the village, is needed. This is precisely the problem. They have walked the corridors of power so long that they honestly think they are the story. It is creepy and sick and the reason politicians get away with all the crap they get away with these days.

Tim Russert was a newsman. He was not the Pope. This is not the JFK assassination, or Reagan’s death, or the Space Shuttle Challenger explosion. A newsman died. We know you miss him, but please shut up and get back to work.

*** Update ***

This post was not an attack on Russert, someone I have said I liked and will miss. It is a sad situation- he was clearly widely loved, and his death is a terrible loss for his family and friends. But that is beside the point, as this post was a commentary on the coverage of his passing, which seems to me, at least, to be indicative of a larger problem.

On the upside of the coverage, though, is this observation that at least MSNBC will not be running prison reality shows all weekend.

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America's generosity is unmatched
[a recent topic of discussion]

... a publication called the Index of Global Philanthropy, which is produced annually by the Center for Global Prosperity at the Hudson Institute in Washington. This is the just released third annual edition of this index. It produces a unique snapshot portraying the full extent of American generosity to developing countries, by amount and by source.

Usually when the question of aid to the developing world arises, we think of government funds. But this index shows that, whereas it may be the rule in the rest of the industrialized world that most aid is government aid, in our country this isn't the case. Most of the contributions that Americans make abroad are private and voluntary. And they are large.

In 2006, the latest year for which data is available, the index reports that Americans contributed privately and voluntarily $34.8 billion to individuals and organizations in developing countries.

Of particular interest in this year's index is the $8.8 billion reported from religious organizations. [snip] The average contribution of congregations was $10,700. To put this in some kind of perspective, the $8.8 billion in giving from American religious institutions [alone] to developing countries was $1.5 billion more than the total giving from all private sources in 30 of the world's major industrialized democratic countries - combined...

[about once a year we'll get some media-hyped story about a prominent European stating how selfish Americans are - sighting government foreign aid as a % of GDP - without ever mentioning that government philanthropy isn't the American model (as it is Europe's). Next time someone tries to pull this stunt might I suggest you ask to compare private donate rates: Americans routinely embarrass all other governments - to say noting of those nations' private giving (why should they? that's what their governments are for...}]

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WATER DISCOVERED ON MARS