We have a serious problem

The United States is at war and the general in charge of the prosecution of that war came before congress to report on the progress which is being made (which is significant) and the political party which controls congress insulted him and called him a liar. That political party's then went on to promise to do all in their power to undermine their nation's war effort and ensure that the enemy achieves victory.

The religious beliefs of the rulers of Iran tell them that paradise on earth can be achieved by means of an apocalyptic war. They are using their nation's oil wealth to develop nuclear weapons and they have all but promised to attack Israel with those weapons as soon as they can.

The leading candidate for the presidential nomination of the Democrat Party in involved in a major scandal involving her fund raising. The largest donor to Democrat politicians in recent years has been exposed as a con-man and wanted felon. This latest dirty-money episode simply continues the pattern of corrupt practices which characterized her husband's two terms in the White House. From all appearances Mrs. Clinton as president would be the bought-and-paid-for property of the Chinese communists just like Mr. Clinton was.

The price of oil just hit $80.00, a record high.

All of this and what is the most popular story on the Internet?

NEW YORK (Sept. 11) - The consensus is clear: Britney Spears performed like she was sloshing blindfolded through mud at MTV's Video Music Awards. No one disputes that the troubled pop princess royally mangled her much-heralded comeback. But what about the nastiest comments of all - those about her body? "Lard and Clear," read Monday's headline in the New York Post. "The bulging belly she was flaunting was SO not hot," wrote E! Online. And so on.

That's right. The American people are most concerned about the fact that a 26-year-old woman who has had two children isn't a size zero any more.

You may wonder what that metallic scraping sound is. It is the sound of 100,000,000 Islamic knives being sharpened.

Count the cost of failure

From The Washington Post:

President Bush implored lawmakers and the nation last night to give him one more chance to win the war in Iraq and avoid the "nightmare scenario" of defeat while presenting a domestic agenda intended to find common cause with the new Democratic Congress on issues such as energy and immigration.

Politically wounded but rhetorically unbowed, Bush gave no ground on his decision to dispatch 21,500 more troops to Iraq despite a bipartisan cascade of criticism. Addressing for the first time a Congress controlled by the other party, Bush challenged Democrats to "show our enemies abroad that we are united in the goal of victory" and warned that the consequences of failure in Iraq "would be grievous and far-reaching."

We will leave aside the areas in which the president wishes to find common cause with the socialists (the areas were he wants to sell out the nation, in other words) for another post. Right now I want to focus on what he said about Iraq.

You might think that going to war in Iraq was the greatest mistake ever in the history of presidential mistakes. Let's say for the sake of argument that you are correct and it was a blunder of massive proportions. From where we are standing now it simply doesn't matter.

I'll say that again. It doesn't matter if the war was a mistake. It doesn't matter if Bush lied to get us there. All that counts is that we are there and every ally and potential ally we have is watching what we will do and every enemy and potential enemy is also watching what we will do.

Osama bin Laden has said that a large part of the reason that he believed that the 9/11 attack would accomplish his goal of getting the US out of the Middle East was his opinion, based upon America's actions in Viet Nam, Lebanon and Somalia that America was a paper tiger whose citizens had been rendered soft and cowardly by the nation's great wealth and the ease of our lives. He hoped that the public would be so shocked and frightened by the death toll of 9/11 that we would insist that the government withdraw from Saudi Arabia and reconsider our support for Israel. The Taliban government of Afghanistan allowed their nation to be used as al Qaeda's base of operations because they shared bin Laden's opinion of the United States.

The "insurgency" in Iraq, whether al Qaeda in Iraq, or the neo-Nazi Ba'ath Party bitter enders or Iranian backed Shiite militias or freelance jihadi "holy warriors" from Saudi Arabia all believe that the resolve that America has shown so far in invading Afghanistan and Iraq is a fluke caused by the people "screwing up" and electing an actual man to be their president.

They believe that if they can just wear down the American public with a constant trickle of deaths and injuries that our weakness and cowardice will come to the surface and we will force
"the last true man in America" to end his resistance to the global jihad and America will retreat within its borders.

It doesn't matter if you disagree with bin Laden's analysis and laugh at the idea of Bush being the "last true man in America"; that is how the militant Muslims see the situation. And they will act upon their perceptions not yours.

If we leave Iraq without defeating the insurgency and establishing a stable government which will be pro-Western, an opponent of terrorism and which offers its citizens some measure of political, economic and religious freedom it will be seen as a defeat of the US and it will be seen as proof that the US lacks the courage to stay in the fight to the finish. It will not matter what words we use to describe our failure. It will not matter in the least if we place the blame on the Iraqis and say that we gave them plenty of time to get their own house in order and they failed and we could not be expected to keep an open ended commitment that was costing us billions of dollars and thousands of lives.

All that will matter is that the jihadists will see it as the signal to begin the next phase of their operations. The next phase will involve bringing the war to the continental United States. America is very vulnerable to attack. A few men with hunting rifles could cause a cascading power failure which would black out everything from Chicago to New York City and south as far as Memphis, TN. A few small canisters of nerve gas in the New York subways would, without killing that many people, cause a panic which would paralyze the city for days and bring the financial markets to a standstill, costing billions.

Suicide bombers in shopping malls, restaurants, schools and stadiums would sow panic and despair and cost the nation's retailers billions. The nation's network of rail transport could be seriously disrupted by blowing up just a handful of railroad bridges. One effect of this would be to cause power plants which burn coal to shut down. Pipelines which carry petroleum and natural gas could be sabotaged causing prices to skyrocket.

A large part of the reason why this isn't happening right now is that Iraq and Afghanistan are occupying the attention of the militant Muslims. Kicking us off of "holy" Middle Eastern soil is job number one for them AND our continued presence there is proof that we are still too "hard" as a nation for attacks within our borders to have the desired effect.

What the global jihad awaits is proof that America's will to resist has been broken and that proof will come when we tuck our tails between our legs and slink back home from Iraq. It will not matter if politicians make speeches about how this is an Iraqi failure not an American failure. All that will matter is that the enemy will see a defeated America and know that the time is right to strike at the heart of the infidel.

The effect on other nations outside of the Middle East must also be taken into account. For example the governments in China and Taiwan are watching all of this. Do you not think that Taiwanese officials are looking at this and wondering how much faith to place in America's guarantees of their security. Do you not think that they are wondering if it might not be best to cut a deal with China. Do you really want to see Taiwan's considerable military and economic power joined to China's even more considerable military and economic power?

Do you want the next president, whoever it happens to be, to have to decide whether to get into a shooting war with China over the Spratley Islands? The Chinese are watching us in Iraq. If we show them that we don't have the resolve to defend our interests in Iraq (even if you don't think we have any legitimate interests in Iraq try to wrap your mind around the idea that everybody else in the world outside of Old Europe and the American Democrat Party does recognize America's interests in Iraq) might they not be moved to exert what they claim to view as their legitimate claim to the Islands? Especially if they have already secured Taiwan?

What about nuclear armed Pakistan? It already has a population in sympathy with the Islamists. How much more pressure will be brought on the government to leave its political position on the edge of the Western World and align itself fully with the terror states if America stops being a part of the Middle East equation?

In the eyes of politicians like Pelosi, Murtha and Kennedy a defeat for the US in Iraq equals a defeat for Bush and the Republicans and therefore a victory for them. Their minds are too small to grasp the fact that the consequences of an American retreat in the face of a dynamic, committed and expansionist enemy, who has what they believe to be the promise of God that they will conquer and transform the entire world, would only result in an escalation of the war, not an end to it.

I restate my original thesis. Even if you believe that the war in Iraq was the most cosmic blunder in the history of the universe we are there now and we have to deal with the situation as it is, not as we wish it might have been. To stay and devote however many lives, however much money and however much time it takes to win an unambiguous victory will, in the end, save countless lives, money and time. And it will be the first step in transforming the Islamic religion and the Arab culture which Islam has created into something fit to exist in 21st century civilization.

Finally, if you are one of those who believes that we CANNOT win stop and think about that. Are you really going to say that a nation with the manpower, wealth and technology of the United States CANNOT defeat around 20 - 30 thousand terrorists? If they are so invincible then why are they already abandoning Baghdad in the face of a promised increase in US troop strength?

Justice by the bay

Jan. 8 - KGO - Members of a renowned choral group from Yale University were attacked outside a New Year's Eve party in San Francisco, sending several of them to the hospital. Now the police department is coming under fire for its handling of the case.

This does not look good for the city. Yale sends its popular singing group, The Baker's Dozen, on a holiday concert tour. And San Francisco sends the young men away bloody, bruised, and several of them seriously injured.

Laura Aziz sent her son, Sharyar, off on a concert tour with one of Yale University's singing groups -- he came to San Francisco over New Year's.

This is how the 18-year-old returned to New York last week.

Sharyar Aziz, Yale University Student: "Besides any bruising or scrapes to the face, the main injury that I suffered was I broke my jaw in two places."

Laura Aziz, Sharyar's Mother: "It was shocking. It didn't make any sense. It still doesn't make any sense."

The Baker's Dozen are a 58-year tradition at Yale. They've put out two dozen albums and toured the country, with appearances at the White House and Los Angeles Lakers games. When their winter tour brought them to San Francisco, retired police officer and department lawyer, Reno Rapagnani, arranged a New Year's Eve party at his home in the group's honor.

Reno Rapagnani, Retired SFPD Lawyer: "I had given strict orders to my daughter that if anything got out of hand that the party would be over."

The trouble started at midnight after The Baker's Dozen sang "The Star Spangled Banner." Witnesses say a few local young men didn't appreciate the attention the Yale students were getting, made fun of their conservative dress and began taunting them and making threats.

[Singing the Star Spangled Banner in San Francisco is like singing Hava Nagila at a Nuremberg rally - LC]

Leanna Dawydiak, Hosted Party: "They had something here special that these other fellas obviously didn't have and that irritated them."

Witnesses say 19-year-old Richard Aicardi was the most aggressive.

Sharyar Aziz: "'You're not welcome here,' he called a few members of the group, whether it was fag or homo, very, I would say, juvenile taunting."

[I would think that in San Francisco homophobic "hate speech" would be punished by summary execution - LC]

Aicardi took out his cell phone and called in reinforcements.

Reno Rapagnani: "He said, 'I'm 20 deep, my boys are coming.'"

[At this point I have to wonder why the "retired SFPD lawyer" didn't take out his cell phone and call reinforcements - LC]

One of the vehicles that brought the attackers was captured by surveillance camera at a church across the street. As The Baker's Dozen left the house, they were ambushed -- five, six, seven assailants attacking each member.

[In a less enlightened place that would be considered evidence - LC]

Their injuries ranged from scrapes, black eyes, a badly sprained ankle to concussions.

The most seriously injured was Sharyar Aziz. He was rushed back to New York for reconstructive surgery -- his jaws wired shut for eight weeks. He'll forever have two titanium plates in his face. The varsity squash player will miss the season, now underway. He's trying to remain positive.

Sharyar Aziz: "I can't just look back at that incident and be depressed for the next two months. I have to learn to deal with what's been given to me."

[There was a time when a few Yale parents would have gotten together and sent a lawyer out to San Francisco who would have teamed with a local PI and spread some money around on the docks. Within a couple of weeks all the punks involved in the assault would have been beaten to the point of lengthy hospital stays and permanent disability/disfigurement. But today we are more "civilized" which means that if the punks are ever arrested and brought to trial before the meanest, nastiest "hanging judge" on the San Francisco bench that their wrists will be slapped so hard that they will sting for a full minute! - LC]

What especially concerns the Aziz family -- when police arrived, they detained four of the attackers who were identified by members of The Baker's Dozen, but officers did not make an arrest. And a full week later, they still haven't made an arrest.

Whitney Leigh, Gonzalez & Leigh Law Firm: "That doesn't seem to comport with traditional police practices and as a result, at least at this point, there's several violent youths or young men, actually, who are out on the street and shouldn't be."

Police investigators didn't even bother to photograph the injuries to The Baker's Dozen. The couple who held the party that night took pictures.

Leanna Dawydiak: "Maybe I'm missing something, but it seems as a citizen in San Francisco that something should be done a little more than has been."

[Leanna, what you are "missing" is that the punks are from politically connected families and the people they attacked were "dressed conservatively" and sang the national anthem. This means that the police know that the number of San Franciscans who will actually care what happened to them can be counted on your fingers. If fact if they do put these little animals on trial there is an excellent chance that there will be massive demonstrations and/or riots on their behalf. Perhaps you might want to take a look out the window one day and note the fact that you are living in SAN FRANCISCO - LC]

Police spokesman Neville Gittens defends the handling of the case.

["Police spokesman", at least in a large department like SFPD means roughly the same thing as "gunwriter" or "New York Times journalist", that is someone who is paid to lie. - LC]

Neville Gittens, SFPD Spokesman: "What you want to do is you want to have a complete, thorough investigation. So the officers responded, the fight was abated and now an investigation is ongoing."

[So if a bunch of rednecks with Klan tattoos were beating up patrons of a swanky gay nightclub the cops would break up the fight and just send everybody home with a promise to do a full investigation at some point in the future? - LC]

The couple who hosted the party wonder whether the authorities are moving slowly because of the family involved. Rich Aicardi and two of his brothers who were involved in the incident are the sons of prominent San Francisco pediatrician Eileen Aicardi.

[That and the fact that the Yale guys were singing the national anthem - LC]

The I-Team met with Eileen Aicardi and her sons last night. They invited us into their home in the shadow of Coit Tower, but later declined to be interviewed. Rich Aicardi did not want to have his picture taken.

[And of course you respect his right not to be photographed. After all it isn't like he did something really evil like date a member of the British royal family. - LC]


UPDATE:

It would seem that the police have been shamed into at least going through the motions of conducting an investigation, but they have some demands:

Now, 10 days later, investigators are demanding that the young men pay their way back to San Francisco to be interviewed. One investigator told a parent, "the kids are affluent, so they can afford it." The Baker's Dozen's attorney says it's ridiculous.

Note that they did not conduct interviews with the victims at the time of the attack, but are willing to do so now, provided that the victims will fly across the country at their own expense.

More than any other city in the United States San Francisco is ruled by the political left. Take a good look before you hit the polls in 2008.

Cleaning house

From Front Page Magazine:

Archbishop Stanislaw Wielgus has resigned after revelations he cooperated with the secret police of Poland's Communist regime. Such clerical collaboration with Communism, an anti-religious movement, is a subject of considerable interest but consider the way the New York Times spun it. Here is the lead from the Times' January 5 story by Craig S. Smith, filed not from Warsaw but Paris:

"Warsaw's new archbishop, Stanislaw W. Wielgus, caught in Eastern Europe's widening witch hunt for former Communist secret police informers, admitted Friday that he had collaborated with the Sluzba Bezpieczenstwa, or Security Service, known as the S.B."

The operative phrase here involves the "widening witch hunt," a curious way to describe a matter of obvious fact, confirmed by the collaborator himself. This was not something invented by New York Times fabricator Jayson Blair.

The only comment necessary is to ask if the Times would characterize the Nuremberg Tribunal a "witch hunt"?

Not long after the Berlin Wall fell I had the opportunity to speak with Vladimir Pozner. I told him that if Russia was going to have a chance to be free it needed a de-communism process like the de-Nazification that followed WWII in Germany.

He disagreed, but I think that events have proven me correct. The Russian organized crime syndicates which are causing so much misery in Russia, Eastern Europe and the world are made up of former KGB agents who would be serving prison sentences, as would dictator wannabe Putin, if there had been a serious effort to bring justice to those who had tormented the Soviet people for so many years.

Righting a wrong

From The New York Times:

WASHINGTON, Jan. 8 — Federal sentencing laws that require lengthy mandated prison terms for certain offenses are expected to come under fresh scrutiny as Democrats assume control of Congress.

Among those eagerly awaiting signs of change are federal judges, including many conservatives appointed by Republican presidents. They say the automatic sentences, determined by Congress, strip judges of individual discretion and result in ineffective, excessive penalties, often for low-level offenders.

Judges have long been critical of the automatic prison terms, referred to as mandatory minimum sentences, which were most recently enacted by Congress in 1986 in part to stem the drug trade. Now influential judges across the ideological spectrum say that the combination of Democratic leadership and growing Republican support for modest change may provide the best chance in years for a review of the system.

“With a changing of the guard, there should at least should be some discussion,” said William W. Wilkins, chief judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, who was nominated by President Ronald Reagan.

There is an old saying, "it's an ill wind that blows no good". While I fully expect the new Democrat majority to engage in much mischief they will almost certainly do some worthwhile things. Things which probably wouldn't get done with Republicans in charge.

Modifying, or better yet abolishing, mandatory minimum sentences would be a great step forward in the service of justice.

The mandatory sentenced movement began with the hysteria over illegal drugs which began to grip the nation in the late '70s and early '80s. Congress stuck its finger in the wind and found that the public was worked up and realized that it would be politically advantages to be seen to be "doing something".

Of course the most intelligent thing they could have done was to legalize recreational drugs and subject them to the same kind of controls that are applied to the alcohol and tobacco industries. However that would have made too much sense for politicians so we got wave of bad legislation which, in addition to mandatory minimum sentences, turned our banks into data collection agents for the federal government.

It was the desire to hinder the operations of drug dealers which led to the rule that banks must report the withdrawal of $10,000.00 or more to the government. Then when people started making multiple withdrawals of just under $10,000.00 to skirt the regulation banks were required to report all "suspicious withdrawals".

Of course the arrival of the age of terrorism would have made similar laws necessary but the imposition of laws which can only be unjustified by the presence of an immanent external threat to stop domestic entrepreneurs from supplying a market need for a product which is either harmless, or harmful only to the voluntary users, was anti-capitalistic and morally wrong.

I know that ending the drug war is too much to expect from this, or any, congress in the short term. However, dismantling some of its more odious side-effects is very possible.

One down. . .

From The Washington Post:

A U.S. Air Force AC-130 gunship attacked suspected al-Qaeda members in southern Somalia on Sunday, and U.S. sources said the operation may have hit a senior terrorist figure.

The strike took place near the Kenyan border, according to a senior officer at the Pentagon. Other sources said it was launched at night from the U.S. military facility in neighboring Djibouti. It was based on joint military-CIA intelligence and on information provided by Ethiopian and Kenyan military forces operating in the border area.

[. . .]

One target of the strike, sources said, was Abu Talha al-Sudani, a Sudanese who is married to a Somali woman and has lived in Somalia since 1993 -- the year of the attack against U.S. troops that was chronicled in the book and movie "Black Hawk Down." In a 2001 U.S. court case against Osama bin Laden, Sudani was described by a leading witness as an explosives expert who was close to the al-Qaeda leader.

More recently, Sudani was identified by U.S. intelligence as a close associate of Gouled Hassan Dourad, head of a Mogadishu-based network that operated in support of al-Qaeda in Somalia. Dourad is one of 14 "high-value" prisoners transferred last September from CIA "black sites" to the U.S. military base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence then disclosed that Dourad "worked for the East African al-Qaeda cell led by . . . al-Sudani" and carried out at least one mission for him, related to a plan to bomb the U.S. military base in Djibouti.

Others have identified Sudani as the financier for Fazul Abdullah Mohammed and Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan, believed responsible for the 1998 bombing of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. All are among the senior al-Qaeda operatives the Bush administration has charged were sheltered by Somalian Islamic fundamentalists controlling Mogadishu, the country's capital. They are believed to have fled late last month when Ethiopian troops drove the fundamentalists out of the capital and toward the Kenyan border.

To all the al-Qaeda leaders who are still alive and uncaptured, as well as other terrorists and enemies of the US including Kim and the Iranian nutjobs: Be patient we will get around to you soon enough.

Making a joke would almost be too easy

NEW YORK (Reuters) - The smell of gas throughout much of Manhattan forced the evacuation of buildings and the suspension of a commuter train service on Monday, authorities and media reported.

There were no immediate reports of injuries.

"We are getting several calls of a foul odor. Our units are responding. It's in various parts of the city," a police spokesman said.

Part of the New York-New Jersey PATH commuter train system, which carries 225,000 passengers a day, was shut as a result.

Something stinks in Manhattan. This is news because it doesn't seem to be coming from New Jersey.

I've been watching the cable news channels obsess about this all morning. What would they be doing if there was really some danger?

Football player murdered

DENVER (AP) - Denver Broncos cornerback Darrent Williams was shot and killed in a drive-by shooting early Monday, his limousine sprayed with bullets in downtown Denver.

Team spokesman Jim Saccomano said police called him about 3 a.m. from the scene and told him three people had been shot, and the 24-year-old Williams had been killed. The killing came hours after the Broncos were eliminated from the playoff race.

A little after 2 a.m., a white Hummer limousine was fired on from a vehicle that pulled up along its side, police spokesman Sonny Jackson said. There were at least eight bullet holes in the limo.
Three people in the limo were hit and were taken to hospitals, where one man was pronounced dead, Jackson said. The other man and woman who were shot were not identified.

Jackson said police were searching for suspects and interviewing witnesses.

Here's a tip. If you can afford a "hummer limousine" you can also afford to have it armored against small arms fire.

The blind leading the blind

Nicole Russell has an essay on The American Thinker about Barack Obama's courting of evangelical Christians:

. . .Senator Barack Obama has begun courting the evangelical right, and some are already waltzing along in perfect time.

With his attendance at Rick Warren‘s church, Saddleback Valley Community, a mega-church in California for a large conference about AIDS, Obama has begun to align himself with an important base of voters to gain what conservatives lost this last year. Already lauded by some prominent evangelical publications for his outstanding "Christian faith" and a person Rick Warren called a "good friend" and a someone he'd like to work with on important issues, Obama is in perfect position, if he can keep the momentum, to use an unusual strategy for political gain.

I believe that Ms. Russell errs in an important point. While Rick Warren calls himself an evangelical and pastors a large church he does not speak for or represent the great majority of evangelicals.

Rich Warren is the inventor and chief proponent of the "seeker friendly" church movement. In a nutshell what this comprises is redesigning the "church experience" in such a way that it will be enjoyable to people who do not like church.

If this causes you to stop and picture what Carmen would look like if it were rewritten for people who prefer DMX to Bizet you have the gist of it.

Taken to its inevitable end this philosophy winds up breeding "churches" which have been described as "christian nightclubs".

The bottom line is that Rick Warren is no more an indication of what evangelicals think than Tony Campolo (you know Bill Clinton's theological enabler).

Rick Warren's association with Barack Obama will do nothing more than hasten Warren's slide into irrevelance. And it won't come a minute too soon.

Gerald R Ford - RIP

From The Washington Post:

Gerald Rudolph Ford Jr., 93, who became the 38th president of the United States as a result of some of the most extraordinary events in U.S. history and sought to restore the nation's confidence in the basic institutions of government, has died. His wife, Betty, reported the death in a statement last night.

"My family joins me in sharing the difficult news that Gerald Ford, our beloved husband, father, grandfather and great grandfather has passed away at 93 years of age," Betty Ford said in a brief statement issued from her husband's office in Rancho Mirage, Calif. "His life was filled with love of God, his family and his country."

The statement did not say where Ford died or give a cause of death. Ford had battled pneumonia in January and underwent two heart treatments -- including an angioplasty -- in August at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn.

Gerald Ford was a decent man who was, unfortunately, a member of the pre-Goldwater/Reagan class of "country club Republicans" whose style of governance was little different from Democrats (except in that era they were less likely to support segregation than Democrats were).

Ford was chosen by President Richard Nixon to fill the role of Vice President after the resignation of Sipro Agnew and then ascended to the Oval Office upon the resignation of President Nixon, making him the only president in the nation's history to have not been elected to either office.

In his inaugural address Ford said, "My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over. . ." and then proceeded to put that "nightmare" (of Watergate) to rest through what was the most controversial decision of his short presidency - the decision to pardon Richard Nixon.

Fair or not the Nixon pardon and all of its consequences (including the disastrous Carter Administration) is the chief legacy of Ford's tenure as president.

James Brown passes away

ATLANTA (AP) - "Godfather of Soul" James Brown remained the hardest-working man in show business to the end, telling friends from his hospital bed that he'd be in Times Square on New Year's Eve, even though he had pneumonia. His heart gave out a few hours later, on Christmas morning.

All Christmas day, famous fans from Mick Jagger to Snoop Dogg to the Rev. Al Sharpton shared memories of their mentor and idol, while lesser-known fans left candles on Brown's Hollywood Walk of Fame star in Los Angeles and streamed to his statue in his boyhood hometown of Augusta, piling mementos and flowers at its base.

James Brown was a great entertainer who pleased many people with his music and his stage performances, however he was also a drug abuser, a criminal and a man who savagely beat his wives.

It should not be a problem for an adult to hold both ideas in his mind at the same time: great entertainer/bad person. However the majority of his fans will not be able to perform that bit of mental juggling. To the average person it seems that any actor or singer or athlete or writer who pleases them can be guilty of no wrong. No matter what the actual facts might be.

This is a tragic flaw in the human personality which is nowhere more on display than in California where a celebrity cannot get convicted of any crime in any court of law.

Look at OJ, who left a blood trail from the murder scene to his house. Then there's Robert Blake who leaves a restaurant with his estranged wife then comes in a few minutes later red faced and sweating bullets, telling anyone who will listen that he left his gun in the restaurant - so if anyone should, oh I don't know, shoot his wife - it couldn't possibly be him. Then comes back into the restaurant again a minute later shouting that someone had just happened to shoot his wife. But it couldn't have been him because he had left his gun in the restaurant.

In both cases California juries failed to convict. On the other hand Scott Peterson, a nobody, was convicted of murdering his wife and sentenced to death and there wasn't one piece of physical evidence tying him to the crime (not that I doubt for a second that he did it).

The culture, or cult, of celebrity worship is going to be on display for the next few days as James Brown is eulogized everywhere from talk radio and television to the halls of congress. We don't worship auto mechanics who do a really good job of rebuilding carburetors but we certainly take our cars to them for repair. Perhaps it is time we stopped idolizing entertainers and sports figures who are really good at their jobs. We can still watch their movies, read their books, listen to their music or cheer their teams, but just not think of them as anything more than that really good mechanic.

More on the Duke Rape Case

Subtitle: Get the fork ready to stick in Nifong cause he's just about done.

Jamie Glazov has a fascinating interview up on today's Front Page Magazine website about the Duke rape case:

Frontpage Interview's guest today is KC Johnson, a professor of history at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center. With a B.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard University, he specializes in 20th century U.S. political, constitutional, and diplomatic history. He writes a blog, Durham-in-Wonderland, which offers comments and analysis about the Duke/Nifong case.

Here some of the more interesting bits:

In a word, no prosecutor with any integrity would continue with this case—but if we have learned nothing else over the past nine months, Mike Nifong is not a man of integrity.

At this point, no pretense exists that anything but self-preservation motivates Nifong. By dropping the rape charges, Nifong effectively impeached his only witness. On April 4, the accuser was shown photographs of the 46 white players on the Duke lacrosse team. In that lineup, the accuser made multiple errors (for starters: claiming to have seen two players who could prove they weren't at the party and incorrectly identifying the player who made the broomstick comment). But she identified four people as possible attackers, and Nifong chose three to indict.

She did more than identify, however: she described what each of the alleged attackers did to her. By offering a new version of events 282 days after the party, Nifong argues for disbelieving the accuser's on-tape descriptions of acts from the April 4 ID session.

But Nifong needed to impeach the accuser to help his own cause. In a December 15 court session, Dr. Brian Meehan, head of a private DNA lab, stated under oath that he and Nifong entered into an agreement to intentionally withhold exculpatory DNA evidence. This move violated North Carolina's Open Discovery Law and contradicted the principle of the Brady decision, which requires turning over any potentially exculpatory material to the defense.

Like a prospective defendant in an ethics or possibly even criminal case, Nifong needed to find ways to minimize the significance of the exculpatory evidence he and Meehan conspired to prevent the defense from seeing.

The bizarre decision to drop the rape charges but retain the others can only be explained by looking at Nifong's legal needs. By claiming that no rape occurred, Nifong can, perhaps, rationalize the decision reached by Meehan and him that the DNA from five, unidentified males was irrelevant to the case, and therefore should be excluded in Meehan's report.

This is very interesting. It seems that Nifong is manipulating a criminal case which he is prosecuting in order to better position himself as a defendant in a civil (or even criminal) case which he anticipates being involved in. The DA manipulating a case fro personal gain had to be right up there at the top of corrupt practices that would form grounds for impeachment and disbarment.

But it doesn't stop here. Other of the left-wing "usual suspects" are indited as well:

Before this incident, the North Carolina NAACP had a recent record of aggressively demanding procedural changes that would ensure fairness for criminal defendants. For instance, the state NAACP backed a 2004 law mandating that prosecutors turn over their entire files to the defense; and also had championed new eyewitness ID procedures calling for use of seven filler photos for every suspect and other due process-friendly changes.

In this case, Nifong created a lineup confined to suspects (the lacrosse players), while on December 15, the head of a private DNA lab admitted under oath that he and Nifong agreed to withhold exculpatory DNA evidence.

Yet not only has the state NAACP not protested the prosecutor's actions, it has consistently defended Nifong. A defense motion requesting a change of venue laid out the extent of the NAACP's actions, which included a posting on the organization's website containing demonstrably false statements about the lacrosse players. Meanwhile, the group designated a case "monitor,' NCCU professor Irving Joyner, who has aggressively bolstered Nifong's case in interviews, falling back on the argument that the prosecutor "must have something" that hasn't been revealed and wholly ignoring the procedural misconduct.

In light of its behavior in this case, it would be difficult to take seriously anything we hear in the future from the NAACP about the civil liberties of criminal defendants.

And:

In June, NOW issued a statement condemning the defense attorneys and the media in the case, suggesting that any criticism of the accuser's veracity (this in a case where the accuser gave at least ten different versions of events, and never told a police officer the same story twice) constituted an assault on her privacy.

Ironically, most criticism (from attorneys and from both the mainstream media and the blogosphere) has focused on Nifong, not the accuser. The impression that many feminists have left—whether intentional or not—is that any criticism of a rape case prosecution, even of a prosecutor who's behaving in an unethical fashion, constitutes unacceptable attacks on the accuser. That isn't a tenable position.

Go read the rest. I didn't even include what he says about the Duke faculty hypocrites.

Mother Calhoon has a saying fro when some bigshot has a well deserved fall. She says they "go down like a big fat hog".

It's going to be fun watching Nifong go down like a big fat hog.

The more things change the more they stay the same

Also from The Washington Post:

Winchester and its neighbors along Interstate 81 in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley have much to recommend themselves to potential employers, including a low cost of living, access to a major highway and views of the nearby Blue Ridge Mountains.

More recently, though, the area has been successfully trumpeting another attribute: It is just outside the "blast zone."

In a little-noticed migration with implications for both greater Washington and the valley, several federal agencies, including the FBI, are relocating operations to the I-81 corridor. Helping drive the shift is the government's emphasis on security in a post-Sept. 11 world, which turns Winchester's location 75 miles from Washington into a geographic ideal. It is far enough from the capital to escape the fallout of a nuclear explosion -- a distance often estimated at 50 miles -- but still close enough so that employees can get to the District relatively easily when they need to.

"There's a certain distance they need to be out from the strike zone -- and Winchester is outside of that," said Jim Deskins, economic redevelopment chief for the 26,000-person city.

How many of you remember the Cuban Missile Crisis? How many of you had a fallout shelter? How many of you read the late Mel Tappan's survivalist columns in Guns and Ammo? How many of you had a bug-out kit with weapons, ammo, food, water, a first aid kit and a plan on where to go to escape the fallout?

After the Soviet Union blew up its first nuclear bomb and especially after they launched the world's first artificial satellite the American people realized that the oceans would no longer protect us and began to take civil defense seriously. For at least a little while.

It didn't take all that long for the well stocked fallout shelters that were put in urban buildings to deteoriate from neglect and the companies that installed fallout shelters in the backyards of private homes to switch over to swimming pools, but for a little while acted like grownups and took our personal safety seriously.

Then the whole "after a nuclear war the living will envy the dead" propaganda started up and people at first just averted their eyes from the possibilities of what could happen and then a younger generation got tired of living under a nuclear Sword of Damocles and, led by the Pied Pipers of the left - who were supported by generous grants from the Soviet KGB, and flocked wholesale to movements like nuclear freeze and unilateral disarmament (things that would have been national suicide if implemented).

Then Ronald Reagan stepped up and saved us from ourselves.

The question is will the new consciousness of security in the age of Islamic terrorism and man-portable nuclear devises, as well as dirty bombs and chemical and biological weapons, erode as quickley as our will to take affirmative steps to ensure the survival of our population in the event of a nuclear war did?

I hope the answer is NO because as hard as I look out toward the horizon I can't seem to see another Ronald Reagan who will step up and save us from ourselves - again.

Now if American Democrats would only step up

From The Washington Post:

LONDON, Dec. 25 -- Ethiopian warplanes attacked the airport in Somalia's capital, Mogadishu, on Monday in another major escalation of fighting between the Ethiopian-backed Somali government and the Islamic Courts movement that in recent months has taken over much of the country.

Who knew that Ethiopia had warplanes? I guess that the Soviets were giving away hardware to anyone who would at least pretend to play on their team. This is a testimony to how robust that old Russian stuff is that it can still fly with maintenance that must give the word minimal a new meaning.

Still and all this is a good thing. If you want to know what the "Islamic Courts" movement is all about just think Taliban.

Also, notice that were there is a trouble spot with people suffering and rivers of blood being spilled you find Islam at the root of it.