Psychology 101

Check this out and tell me if it doesn't remind you of Bill Clinton.

Alberto Gonzales Resigns

From The Washington Post:

Embattled Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales has resigned from his post, according to an administration official, ending a controversial cabinet tenure that included clashes with Congress over the firing of nine U.S. attorneys and the scope of efforts to spy on U.S. citizens.

The official said Gonzales submitted a letter on Friday saying he had decided to step down, but the announcement was withheld until he met with President Bush at the president's Crawford ranch. His resignation will be announced later today, the official said.

Mixed feelings. Gonzales was a lightweight who should never have been made Attorney General in the first place.

However he did not deserve the vilification which he has had heaped upon him. While he could have handled his relations with congress better it remains a fact that most of his problems in that area can be traced to the rise of the lunatic fringe to control of the Democrat Party.

I haven't a clue who Bush will appoint to replace Gonzalez, but I hope that it is someone whose performance before congress will bring to mind Oliver North at the Iran/Contra hearings.

Anybody remember John F Kerry?

Beldar Blog notes that Sen. John F Kerry has allowed the last date at which he could have filed a defamation suit against the Swiftboat Vetrans to pass without taking any action. He has a good essay on the topic up. Here is the money quote:

So let's drop the snark and call a spade a spade: The very last thing John Kerry wants is to ever give the SwiftVets the legal tools they'd need to conclusively document their claims, because truth is, of course, a complete defense to defamation claims. Kerry doesn't deserve vindication, and he knows he could never get it in court. In court, there would be compulsory discovery of witnesses and documents, followed by a fair and disciplined adversary process, followed by a definitive determination of the truth or falsity of the SwiftVets' charges — a determination that he damn well knows would go against him. Instead, the haze of time and the near-universal bluster of his mainstream media allies (who continue to insist that the SwiftVets' claims were "debunked" and that Kerry was victimized) has given him a far better result than he could ever get in court.

Good stuff. If you go to a Democrat Party activist or a member of the mainstream media (I know redundant) and ask them today they will tell you that the SwiftboatVets accusations against Kerry were definitively proven to be a pack of lies, but if you ask for specifics all they can really do is point to Kerry's denials.

Last seen 53 miles west of Venus

From The American Thinker:

James Hansen, NASA's True Believer in the global warming credo, has just been quoted by the Globe & Mail of Canada as follows:

"Prof. Hansen and his colleagues argue that rapidly melting ice caps in Antarctica and Greenland could cause oceans to swell several metres by 2100 - or maybe even as much as 25 metres, which is how much higher the oceans sat about three million years ago."

In an email to the Globe and Mail, Hansen writes:

"If we follow 'business-as-usual' growth of greenhouse gas emissions... I think that we will lock in a guaranteed sea-level rise of several meters, which, frankly, means that all hell is going to break loose."

For all you non-metric folks, 25 meters equals 82 feet, or about as high as an eight-story building. "Several meters" is only about 9-15 feet. That's the wall of water that is going to drown all the coastal plains of the world if Hansen's predictions come to pass.

So you have a choice. You can either (a) hop in your car and head for the hills, or (b) consider the very real possibility that Dr. James Hansen has jumped the shark, and is rocketing upward fast enough to achieve orbital velocity. I personally think he has slipped the surly bonds of earth, as the poet says. NASA's Prophet of Doom is up, up and away, with a beautiful vrroom.

Dr. Hansen is a math modeler in the climate change game. How does he get Planetary Doom from a math model? It's very simple. You build in "positive feedback loops." That is, you look in the vast toolbox of climate variables to find just two factors that might reinforce each other in a catastrophic loop. For instance, carbon dioxide in the atmosphere might create a greenhouse effect, which causes more heating, which causes more water evaporation, which causes more greenhouse effect, which causes more heating, etc., etc. Keep looping that, and you raise world temps by just one degree Centigrade, so the polar ice caps melt and the oceans rise, up to 25 meters. See? It's easy.

The big problem with this scenario is that the climate system almost certainly has negative feedback loops, i.e., causal connections that work to bring temperatures back to a rough baseline. The climate is likely to have self-regulation mechanisms in much the way that our bodies have self-regulating loops to stabilize our temperature, blood sugar, and a hundred other variables. Why does that seem likely? Because the world hasn't burned up or drowned in quite a long time, even though temperature variations and greenhouse gases have existed for many millions of years. Such factors as clouds and air particulates are believed to lower temperatures. With a little imagination we could easily build math models for self-regulating loops that would tend to stabilize temperatures. (But it might be hard to swing the federal grant support for those models.)

However, Dr. Hansen is a true True Believer. So he is not bothered by doubt. He is tremendously irritated by the very existence of doubters, however, like Steve MacIntyre of ClimateAudit.org, who has twice punctured Dr. Hansen's beautiful balloon -- once by knocking down the infamous "hockey stick" curve, and more recently, by showing that Dr. Hansen blew it by claiming that 1998 was the hottest year on record in the continental United States. Turns out that the Dust Bowl was hotter than today, as any farmer might have guessed. Drat it, another beautiful hypothesis, crunched by ugly facts.

Go read the rest.

This kind of hysteria from the loons is a good sign. It means that they have a glimmer that the house of cards is about to come down around them and they are desperatly trying to keep it standing for just a little while longer. No doubt so that they can milk it for a few more millions in grant money.

There is no state in the union where he'll be welcome

LOS ANGELES, Aug. 26 (AP) — A self-described pedophile said he would leave California after a judge ordered him to stay away permanently from places where children gather, the man told a television station for a report that was broadcast Sunday.

“I have to leave the state, really, I can’t live here under this Orwellian protocol,” the man, Jack McClellan, told the station, KABC. “It’s nightmarish.”

Mr. McClellan did not say where he planned to go. He did not immediately return a message left on his cellphone by The Associated Press. He has been unemployed and living in his car since arriving in Southern California this summer from Washington State.

Mr. McClellan, 45, came to the attention of the authorities because of a Web site where he posted photographs of children in public places and discussed how he liked to stake out parks, public libraries, fast-food restaurants and other areas where little girls congregated. His Internet service provider took down his Web site more than a month ago.

Mr. McClellan maintained he started the site as a form of therapy and would not do anything illegal. He has never been charged with molesting.

He has never been charged with molesting - YET.

I almost feel sorry for this guy. I don't think that he woke up one morning and said, "you know from this point forward I'm only going to be turned on by little girls". While I absolutely believe that he can control his actions I do not believe that he can in any way control his desires.

What makes him dangerous is that he does not recognize that his desires in this case are evil. Everyone has some kind of dark side. Everyone has a dark fantasy of some kind. Perhaps it is little girls or boys or maybe it is homosexuality or sexual violence (giving or receiving) or something so weird that I can't even conceive of it. The point is that normal people understand that those "dark side" thoughts are not things that can ever be acted upon (other than in a role playing game with a willing partner).

The pedophile, the rapist, the true sadist don't understand that some desires are not appropriate to act upon. They regard those who suppress their dark natures to be hypocrites. They are like David Hamilton, the European pedophile photographer, who openly brags that he does what other men only dream of doing and believes that makes him superior to those other men.

Jack McClellan believes that a judges order keeping him away from children is "Orwellian". For him to possess such a profound lack of understanding of how wrong it is for him to do the things he does and his profound lack of self control in being unable to stay away from those places where he would be tempted makes him extremely dangerous.

I truly wish there there were a remote place of exile to which people like McClellan could be sent where they could live out their lives far from anyone whom they might harm.

Tonight's Music

I've been looking for a video of this song to post for a good long time. This is Both Sides the Tweed, performed here by the Irish duo Leiheidi. It is about the 1707 union of England and Scotalnd which saw the end of Scotland as an independant kingdom. Technically it also saw the end of the independant kingdom of England and in the place of the seperate kingdoms formed the United Kingdom of Great Britian.

However in practice Scotland's tiny parlementary delagation was swallowed up by the vastly larger number of English MP's and they held no effective power.

Over time the union did bring numerous economic advantages to the Scots, however they also made possible the notorious Highland Clearances.

A free man is formidable, a free man with a gun is downright deadly

From The Brussels Journal:

A quote from Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago

And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand? [...] The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If...if... We didn’t love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation. [...] We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.

Yes! Absolutely true.

The Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising proved that even a relatively small number of people who are willing to take up arms and fight can bring even a mighty army to a standstill. What would have happened if all of the peoples in the Nazi occupied lands had shown the same resolve and courage?

What would have happened in New Orleans after hurricane Katrina if the criminal thugs, who happened to be wearing badges, who went from house to house stealing the firearms of private citizens had been dispatched by those citizens. I have a friend who has spent most of his adult life in law enforcement who thinks that is exactly what should have happened. Kill them and throw their bodies in the river and defy the other cops to prove who pulled the trigger.

A free person cannot be oppressed. He can be killed, but he will not be oppressed. If that free man is joined by other free men and women who are likewise unwilling to be oppressed, and to die, but take as many of the jackbooted thugs with him/her as possible the tyrant will find he has a very tough row to hoe.

Iraq Anti-War Movement: A Pop Quiz for Americans

From The American Thinker:

Beginning August 28, America will witness the new thrust of Anti-Iraq War Protests. The aim of these protests is exactly the same as the other protests you have seen to date: altering the public perception of the War, thereby manipulating public opinion (polling) against the war.

Americans, beware, you must be on guard against this tactic; it is one of the known symptoms of a fatal virus, historically infamous for killing off entire civilizations. Our mainstream media already has it, and if you are not very, very cautious, you will also - may already - be infected.

This is a very contagious, quickly spreading, society-fatal virus, known as TNSTAAL (There's No Such Thing As a Lie), and it is vital that every American be prepared with the antidote serum: the truth. Not to worry though; the serum is extremely potent. You don't even need "the whole truth" and "nothing but the truth," because even a little of the "truth" will help you defeat this virus, and it is easily available and pretty darned cheap. Just being aware of the virus every time you see the news on television or read a newspaper, gets you halfway to the cure.

To help you get started, I have devised this "Citizen's Quiz," and have even provided the answers, and a few clues to help you find more of the antidote "truth serum."

WARNING: Failure to detect this deadly TNSTAAL virus will be deadly to America. Once a society is infected, it only takes a matter of several decades to kill off the entire culture; we are already in our 4th decade. Our great Country -- that took hundreds of years to build, the lives of millions of our greatest men and women on battlefields across the world, and more sweat, blood and tears than you or I could ever shed - all of that - could disappear if we are not prepared to recognize the TNSTALL virus and stock up on the truth antidote.

Go take the quiz.

Hillary rides to the rescue - of the GOP?

INDIANAPOLIS — He may be on his way out the door at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. in coming days. But the party Karl Rove has labored to build over the past eight years seems to have picked up his talking points on next year’s presidential race: Hillary Rodham Clinton is going to be the Democratic nominee and that could be the GOP’s saving grace in an otherwise uphill battle.

Conversations with Republicans gathered here for the biennial Midwest Republican Leadership Conference reflect a party unenthused or just plain uncertain about their potential White House nominee. But GOP faithful also seem quite confident and even upbeat about the prospect that the senator from New York is, as Rove put it, the “prohibitive favorite to win the nomination.”

That likelihood, they say, is good news for any hopes of keeping the White House and getting other Republicans on the ballot elected.

Asked if Clinton being the nominee would improve his party’s chances both nationally and in Indiana, Howard County (Ind.) GOP Chair Craig Dunn got excited. “Absolutely, absolutely!” he exclaimed animatedly, grinning widely. “We’ve never elected a president of the United States who started off with 45 percent unfavorable ratings!”

I agree that the best thing the Republican Party has going for it is Hillary Clinton. However the Party needs to give people something to vote for as well as someone to vote against. To that end we need to have a message that will resonate with the American people.

Fred Thompson especially needs to keep that in mind:

INDIANAPOLIS — Fred Thompson thinks the country faces a tough road ahead and he's not glossing over the problems we face. In fact, he's anxious to outline the daunting litany and appears to be basing his forthcoming campaign on the assumption that his party shares the same outlook.

In a 25-minute after-dinner speech to attendees of the Midwestern Republican Leadership Conference here, Thompson offered a stark assessment of what he described as America's perilous condition.

"I simply believe that on the present course that we're going to be a weaker, less prosperous, more divided nation than what we have been," Thompson told the crowd in a deep baritone that rarely strayed from an even tone. "I do not say that lightly, but I think it's the truth. And I think the American people are ready for the truth."

There are three major challenges, Thompson said, and none are being given appropriate attention or sufficient commitment. National security ("our country's in danger; it's going to be that way for a long time to come"), the economy ("we are doing steady damage to our economy, that if we don't do things better it's going to result in economic disaster for future generations") and the polarization, cynicism and incompetence gripping the capital ("in order to have leadership you got to have somebody who's going to follow; our people follow, but they don't have any confidence in what's being said or who's saying it").

Everything Fred says here is true, but downbeat is not what people want to hear. Yes, they will eagerly listen to the list of all the ways the other party has screwed up the country, but they want to hear how our guy(s) are going to fix things.

If Fred is going to accurately identify the problems he needs to be ready with a specific list of fixes. People will get excited about a positive program to heal the nation not a laundry list of problems.

Dead or alive?

This from NBC6 in South Florida:

U.S. Senior officials said that while there are reports on setbacks in Fidel Castro's health, there are no indications that his death is imminent.

Nothing unusual has been reported from Havana. However, Miami is ablaze with rumors, NBC News reported.

On Thursday, Cuba's foreign minister, Felipe Perez Roque, said rumors about Fidel Castro's deteriorating health are untrue. Roque told reporters in Brazil that the 81-year-old was still in charge of Cuban affairs. He said Castro is "being informed and consulted constantly."

Roque made the comments to reporters while attending the Forum for East Asia-Latin American Cooperation in Brazil.

Cubans were hoping Fidel would make a public appearance during his birthday celebrations nearly two weeks ago.

Castro has not been seen in public for over a year since he transferred power to his brother after surgery.

As they say rumors have been flying around the Miami area that the old bastard has already assumed room temperature. Val Prieto posted this yesterday on Babalu Blog:

Ok. So once again - this must be like the millionth time - we were duped into the fidel castro is dead thing. But were we, really? Does anyone really think he's still alive, all all of that hullaballooo?

Here's my take, once again:

fidel castro is dead.

Take it to the bank.

This was also posted over there:

Hugo Chavez parroted the denial of the castroites in claiming his Havana Tio was alive and well. But as soon as he did, he started babbling on about castro's legacy, not his physical presence. He spoke in general and symbolic terms, rather than factual ones. Does this sound like a man who really knows that castro is alive and well?

'For those who want him to die, they will get frustrated, because Fidel Castro will never die,' Chavez told a socialist rally in the capital Caracas. 'He will always live among the people that fight for a better destiny. He will always live in the people of Cuba, Venezuela and the Americas.'

I think the dictator of Caracas might have let the cat out of the bag. I hope raul is screaming about it.

The Dowager Viscountess doesn't care if the rumors are false they still give her an occasion to post things like this:

If you've seen these men call the FBI at 206-622-0460

From The New York Times:


SEATTLE, Aug. 25 — Earlier this summer a concerned crew member of a Washington State ferry boat snapped pictures of two men who had raised suspicions on several ferry rides by asking questions about structural details and entering areas of the boats that are off limits.


Now, after the Federal Bureau of Investigation released two photographs of the men to the public with the goal of identifying them, a debate has erupted over alleged racial profiling, one ferry was shut down briefly this week and the men, while suddenly familiar faces, remain unidentified.


“We have some promising leads that have come in since we published the pictures,” said Larry Carr, a special agent with the Seattle field office of the F.B.I. The agency released the images on Monday.


The pictures show two men with dark hair and olive skin standing beside a ferry deck railing overlooking the water. Their hands are in their pockets. Their eyes look toward the camera. In a statement released that day, the agency said the men had “exhibited unusual behavior.” The behavior “may have been innocuous,” the agency said, but law enforcement “would like to resolve these reports.”

This is the picture that the New York Times will not show you. The men were reported by the passengers and crew of several ferries as they moved about the boats taking photographs which could be used to build a detailed floorplan of the ferry. The men were extremely interested in the functioning of the boats and they repeated this behavior on several boats over several days.

This incident, like the "flying imams" is an attempt to both gain information for a possible terrorist attack and an attempt to desensitize the public and law enforcement to suspicious activity my Middle Eastern/Muslim persons.

It is also an attempt to set up a confrontation with government agencies hamstrung with political correctness:

Dozens of Muslims and Arabs have complained to community leaders about the photographs. The fallout has led to a meeting planned today between Muslim- and Arab-American community leaders and law-enforcement officials.

"We need to get some type of apology from them and figure out how to get back to where we were," said Rita Zawaideh, head of the Arab-American Community Coalition.

Notice that the concern of these "Arab-American community leaders" was not that a ferry possibly carrying members of the local Arab-American community would be bombed. All of her attention was focused on getting the FBI to apologize for doing its job and trying to protect the lives of American citizens.

Almost all acts of terrorism carried out in the world today are the acts of Muslims and most of them have been Middle Eastern men. If the Arab community of the Pacific Northwest is so scared of being racially profiled let them remove themselves to a place where they will not stand out so much. A place like Saudi Arabia for example.

Hardball in Florida

From The Washington Post:

The Democratic National Committee sought to seize control of its unraveling nominating process yesterday, rejecting pleas from state party leaders and cracking down on Florida for scheduling a Jan. 29 presidential primary.

The DNC's rules and bylaws committee, which enforces party rules, voted yesterday morning to strip Florida of all its delegates to the 2008 Democratic National Convention in Denver -- the harshest penalty at its disposal.

The penalty will not take effect for 30 days, and rules committee members urged officials from the nation's fourth-most-populous state to use the time to schedule a later statewide caucus and thus regain its delegates.

By making an object lesson of Florida, Democrats hope to squelch other states' efforts to move their voting earlier, which have created chaos in the primary structure that the national party has established. But the decision to sanction such a pivotal, vote-rich state has risks.

The party punished Delaware in 1996 for similar rules violations. But Florida, a mega-state that has played a pivotal role in the past two presidential elections, is different. The clash leaves the presidential candidates in limbo about how to campaign there.

Asked what Hillary Rodham Clinton's plans are for the state, Harold Ickes, a DNC member and adviser to the New York senator, said, "I don't think anyone's going to answer that question, or cross that bridge, until we see what happens in the next 30 days."

Bill Burton, a spokesman for Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.), said, "Hopefully, in the next 30 days, Florida and the DNC can reach agreement so Florida's delegates can contribute to the nomination contest."

Personaly I think the primaries should be spread out over several months and scheduled in such a way that the outcome is not known until the final round of voting. That may not always be possible, but at least the candidates would have to pay attention to the entire nation.

Having said that the United States is a federal republic and each state should have the maximum freedom to manage its own affairs so I hope Florida pushes back aggressively. Let the DNC strip them of delegates if it feels it must, but let the Democrat Party in Florida announce that it will sit out the 2008 elections. No help from the state organization to the candidate at the top of the ticket or to the people running for House or Senate. Only candidates running for statewide offices will get help in Florida from the Florida party organization

Tonight's Music - By Request

Tonight we have another video from Dropkick Murphys. This is the song Tessie.

2007 Brown Mountain Lights Festival

The Brown Mountain Lights. What are they? What could they be doing here?

Where can I see them? Are they real?

These and other questions will be drawing hundreds of visitors to the village of Linville Falls during the weekend of September 14-16 for the second annual festival held in celebration of these mysterious colored lights that have appeared for centuries upon a nearby ridge top. This year’s festival will be markedly different from the one before in that it will focus solely on the lights, since the county heritage component has moved to another community. As in last year’s fest, however, mountain music will be an eminent feature joining a lecture series throughout Saturday to celebrate what is perhaps the most famous of North Carolina’s natural mysteries. Slated to perform on the outdoor stage are the Wiseman Family, Herb Greene, Herman Coffey, and Terry McKinney. Speakers include Appalachian State University physics professor Dan Caton, the paranormal research group from Asheville, L.E.M.U.R., and Linville Gorge expert, Bob Underwood, among others.

Regional fine arts and crafts will be exhibited and offered for sale on Saturday. Friday night’s open-mike session at the bonfire will attract people willing to share their own experiences of seeing the lights. There will be music and a bonfire at Wiseman’s View on Saturday night. An interdenominational church service Sunday at 11 a.m., also at Wiseman’s View on Linville Gorge’s western rim, will close the festivities. Sponsored by the Linville Falls Village Association and the Jonas Ridge Fire and Rescue the festival will again converge on the exhibition hall across from Linville Falls Lodge on highway 183, near its junction with highway 221 and near the stone post office building. The Jonas Ridge Fire Department will be providing food and drinks as part of its fundraising drive. The distinctive Brown Mountain Lights tee-shirts (and sweatshirts)
will be available.

Artists and crafts persons are invited to exhibit at the festival. Ten-foot by ten tents with table are available for rent for $50.00, or participants may bring their own tents and pay an entry fee of $35.00. Interested vendors should contact Shirley McNeil sgmcneil1@bellsouth.net. Festival directions and schedules are posted on the village web site at: www.linvillefallsvillage.com.

I'll see you there. The lights, BTY, are not a fable. They are a real phenomena witnessed and photographed by thousands of people every year (including myself). Go here for a rundown on what causes them.

That doesn't look like fun

SURREY, British Columbia (Aug. 25) - A hot air balloon burst into flames over western Canada, burning two passengers to death while their families looked on, police said Saturday. Other passengers leaped to the ground, some with their clothes in flames, witnesses said.

Eleven people were seriously injured when the balloon crashed Friday evening in a recreational vehicle park in Surrey, British Columbia, a suburb of Vancouver. There were 12 passengers and a pilot on board, police and witnesses said.

Royal Canadian Mounted Police Sgt. Roger Morrow said relatives of the two passengers killed witnessed the fire. He declined to comment on reports that the dead were a mother and her grown daughter.

"It's just tragic. They watched it unfold before their eyes," Morrow said of the families. "The fatalities suffered from burns."

The balloon caught fire as it prepared to launch, said Bill Yearwood, an investigator with the Transportation Safety Board of Canada.

"The crew loaded 12 passengers and was preparing to launch when a fire erupted. The pilot asked the passengers to get out of the basket," he said. "The balloon was tethered at the time, but then broke and came loose," he added.

Can't say I've ever heard of anything like that happening before. It had to be a problem with the balloon's prophane burner.

Some get paid and others do it for free

From The New York Post:

August 15, 2007 -- Maybe Britney Spears is more interested in being with a mom.

The pop tart was spied frolicking in a pool with another topless woman in exclusive photos obtained by OK! magazine.

The mystery woman playing touch-and-kiss with Spears in the rooftop pool at the Standard Downtown Hotel in L.A. is the singer’s one-time assistant Shannon Funk.

But Britney has also made moves on porn star Jenna Jameson and has kissed at least 15 women in her life, the magazine is reporting.

OK! quotes Jameson, fellow adult star Tera Patrick and an anonymous former employee as sources. They all say Spears is a recreational lesbian.

As opposed to Jenna Jameson and Tera Patrick who are professional lesbians.

The modern Left learns from the master

From The Brussels Journal:

Adolf Hitler described how to use “spiritual terror” to intimidate and silence opponents, a technique he learned from watching the Socialists and the Social Democrats. He understood “the infamous spiritual terror which this movement exerts, particularly on the bourgeoisie, which is neither morally nor mentally equal to such attacks; at a given sign it unleashes a veritable barrage of lies and slanders against whatever adversary seems most dangerous, until the nerves of the attacked persons break down and, just to have peace again, they sacrifice the hated individual… Conversely, they praise every weakling on the opposing side, sometimes cautiously, sometimes loudly, depending on the real or supposed quality of his intelligence.”

It still goes on today. Racist, sexist, homophobe - all are words designed to halt debate and stop critical thought.

Saturday morining cartoons and a commerical

Another Haditha Marine cleared

From The New York Times:

A military investigator has recommended dismissing all charges against a Marine Corps infantryman accused of killing Iraqi civilians, including women and children, in a house-to-house raid in Haditha in late 2005.

The infantryman, Lance Cpl. Stephen B. Tatum, was charged in December with unpremeditated murder of two people and negligent homicide in the deaths of four others near the site of a roadside bomb attack on a Marine convoy. The dead were among 24 people who Marine prosecutors said were civilians killed by three members of a Marine squadron after the bomb attack, which killed a lance corporal, on Nov. 19, 2005.

But in his report yesterday to the general who will decide whether to pursue a case against Lance Corporal Tatum, the lawyer who presided over a hearing of the evidence recommended dropping all charges because of insufficient evidence to show that he acted outside the rules of engagement. “LCpl. Tatum shot and killed people in houses 1 and 2,” wrote the marine lawyer, Lt. Col. Paul J. Ware, “but the reason he did so was because of his training and the circumstances he was placed in, and not to exact revenge and commit murder.”

Lance Corporal Tatum is one of three enlisted marines charged with murder in the case. Last month, Colonel Ware recommended dropping charges against another of the marines, Lance Cpl. Justin L. Sharratt.

I await the sure to be forthcoming apology from congressman "Traitor" Jack Murtha, who pronounced the Marines guilty before the investigation had even began.

More good news out of Iraq

From The New York Times:

WASHINGTON, Aug. 24 — The number of detainees held by the American-led military forces in Iraq has swelled by 50 percent under the troop increase ordered by President Bush, with the inmate population growing to 24,500 today from 16,000 in February, according to American military officers in Iraq.

The detainee increase comes, they said, because American forces are operating in areas where they had not been present for some time, and because more units are able to maintain a round-the-clock presence in some areas. They also said more Iraqis were cooperating with military forces.

[. . .]

“Interestingly, we’ve found that the vast majority are not inspired by jihad or hate for the coalition or Iraqi government — the vast majority are inspired by money,” said Capt. John Fleming of the Navy, a spokesman for the multinational forces’ detainee operations. The men are paid by insurgent leaders. “The primary motivator is economic — they’re angry men because they don’t have jobs,” he said. “The detainee population is overwhelmingly illiterate and unemployed. Extremists have been very successful at spreading their ideology to economically strapped Iraqis with little to no formal education.”

It would seem that the way to defeat the insurgency is to restore order by suppressing terrorist activity while rebuilding the nation's infrastructure and getting the schools operating. All of which is what we are doing.

BTY, since this is the New York Times here is how they attempt to spin the good news into a negative:

But the detention system itself often serves as a breeding ground for the insurgency and a training opportunity for those who, after they are released, may attack Iraqi or American-led forces, military officers say.

AND

Over all, he said, human rights organizations “have concerns about a 50 percent increase in detainees because it is 50 percent more people at risk of having been arbitrarily detained or, worse, of being handed over to Iraqi officers who might subject them to torture.”

I guess if you are the kind of person who works for the NYT the ACLU's concerns actually mean something to you.