PRESTOPUNDIT -- "It's a team sport, baby!"

A PLEA

to the thousands of leftists who give us the pathetically inaccurate and politically distorted NY Times:

put yourself in my slippers: imagine how your Sunday morning coffee encounters with The Times would sour if the front page of the Arts & Leisure section were turned over to, say, Ann Coulter. Is that the kind of paper you want? That's the paper you have.

-- Bob Kohn.

My guess? It's the kind of paper they want.

DEMOCRACY ..

the voting begins.

GOOD JOB NEWS ..

... IN AUSTRALIA.

A SEMINAR

in American foreign policy for John "Global Test" Kerry from Libya's from Moammar Ghadhafi:

America as any other states and individuals has the right to defend itself, either in accordance with article 51 of the UN Charter, that is actually inoperative or with else. Right of self defense is a legitimate matter . And America possesses the power enabling it to. In this regard America does not need anybody to defend itself, strike its enemy or even get assistance to justify that.

THE FOLKS

at "The Onion" are mere pretenders -- trust me on this.

THE FORGED DOCUMENTS:

New proof -- the French did it. (via Kerryhaters)

"DISTRIBUTED REPORTING"

"refers to the concept that "Truth" and "Fairness" and "Accuracy" are too big to be "owned" by a narrow group moribund, lazy, and corrupt old-media organizations or formerly-respected talking-head dinosaurs, but in fact are more likely to be found by the action of many individuals working separately and then sharing their research, opinions, and perspectives freely."

-- The Spoons Experience

More on this topic here and here.

UPDATE: Robert Clayton Dean --

An awesome glimpse at the potential for distributed intelligence is occurring right now in the blogosphere .. UPDATE: .. Dave Sheridan points out that its not just distributed intelligence, it is actually a glimpse of the face of the true god of liberty, spontaneous order.

ABC NEWS

enters a new dimension in "gotcha" journalism:

.. the authenticity of the memos was questioned Thursday by the son of the late officer who reportedly wrote them. One of the writer's fellow officers and a document expert also said Thursday the documents appear to be forgeries. Still, the documents marked the second time in days the White House had to backtrack from assertions that all of Bush's records had been released.

(via Kerry Haters)

UPDATE: Paul Krugman is also using the forged CBS documents to play "gotcha" with the President.

JOHN PODHORETZ --

"The citizen revolution against the mainstream media continues."

INCOMPETENT?

Dishonest? We're talking the NY Times here. How about both.

UPDATE: Just One Minute has more on the NY Times and the "Texans for Truth" story. Quotable: "Whatever "truth-detector" is issued in the standard Times package evidently failed to sound the alarm when Bob Mintz came knocking with his Bush-bashing story."

FRANCE --

An enemy not an ally.

GOOD NEWS

from Najaf. The U.S. gains control and the noose tightens.

KERRY'S FOREIGN POLICY HAS FAILED

IN IRAN. Charles Krauthammer on what lies ahead:

Iran will go nuclear during the next presidential term .. If nothing is done, a fanatical terrorist regime openly dedicated to the destruction of the "Great Satan" will have both nuclear weapons and the terrorists and missiles to deliver them. All that stands between us and that is either revolution or preemptive strike.

DON'T WE LOVE THE FRENCH.

Spectators spit on Lance Armstrong.

JOE WILSON --

pathological liar, nut job. The Daily Howler has the goods. (via Patterico).

UPDATE: The latest from Wilson -- it's the Hillary defense. From today's editorial page of the LA Times. Now Michael Kinsley has joined the Times news side in the effort to bring back from the dead Wilson's attack on a Republican President. Go team Democrat!

UPDATE: Steyn is on the case -- ,

A TALE OF TWO CITIES.

"The role of freedom in creating prosperity has been the central discovery of economics over the past two centuries. What still tends to go unappreciated is that individual freedom has an emotional and spiritual value at least as important as its economic value. When one's activities are freely chosen and freely pursued, they create pleasure in themselves, not just through what is produced. That's why Caroline Gutierez of Hyder [Alaska] saw herself as "still on vacation" despite her two businesses and eight volunteer positions." MORE -- "Go Ahead, Call Us Cowboys".

400 tons of uranium.

Left behind in Iraq. Patterico ain't happy.

"How dreadful are the curses which Mohammedanism lays on its votaries!"

-- Winston Churchill. As quoted by Mark Steyn.

The War on Terror is Job #Five.

So says Presidential candidate John Kerry -- transcript provided in a brilliant letter sent to InstaPundit.

Mexican border tunnel funnel.

Yep, they've found another one.

Yell it out loud: "Allie allie in free!"

Hans Blix goes "existential."

And his arguments bound into the silly stupid zone. European decedance has slid from the appalling to the just plain dumb. Charles Krauthammer reports.

Asa Hutchinson's email box is FULL.

Asa Hutchinson, under-secretary at the Homeland Security Department, has a full mail box thanks to John Kobylt and his 1,000,000 listeners in the Los Angeles area. Kobylt of the John & Ken Show today sought Hutchison's committment to resuming the round up of foreign nationals illegally residing in Southern California. Hutchison had stopped these roundups for political reasons last month. They have not been resumed, and Hutchison refused to announce their resumption. So as of today, the near interior of California is officially an open borders zone for foreign nationals in America.

UPDATE: QandO has a full report.

Mark Steyn on Islam & the fate of the West.

"Of the increase in global population between 1970 and 2000, the developed world accounted for under 9% of it, while the Muslim world accounted for 26% of the increase. Between 1970 and 2000, the developed world declined from just under 30% of the world's population to just over 20%; the Muslim nations increased from about 15% to 20%. 1970 isn't that long ago. If you're, say, 50, you wear narrower trousers and shorter hair than you used to, but the landscape of your life � your house, your car, your kitchen appliances � doesn't seem significantly different. But the fact is the world's people are a lot more Islamic than they were back then and a lot less Western. Europe is significantly more Islamic, having taken in during that period some 20 million Muslims (officially) � or the equivalents of the populations of three EU countries (Ireland, Belgium, Denmark). Islam is the fastest-growing religion in the West: in the United Kingdom, more Muslims than Christians attend religious services each week. So we're living through a period of extraordinarily rapid demographic and cultural change that broadly favors the Islamists' stated objectives, a period of rapid technological advance that greatly facilitates the Islamists' objectives, and a period of rapid nuclear dissemination that will add serious heft to the realization of their objectives. If the West is to survive, it will only be after a long struggle lasting many decades."

MORE -- Mark Steyn

Mexican nationals will get U.S. Social Security benefits.

As if the current system weren't already bankrupt enough, Mexican nationals will be given U.S. Social Security benefits so long as they can con an American bureaucrat into believing that they've worked in the U.S. for 18-months. And of course in reality it won't matter whether the work was done by a Mexican national living illegally in the United States. Or, deed, whether the work was done off the books, with zero dollars taxed for Social Security. And as we know, the Social Security system is a redistribution system, and low wage illegal Mexican nationals will be getting far more dollars from U.S. citizens than any U.S. taxes they might happen to pay.

What's the expression .. "Your tax dollars at work."

$4-5 billion skimmed in U.N.'s Cash-for-Saddam Program.

So says U.N. investigator PAUL VOLCKER. A collection of corrupt nations form a club -- what mental giant came up with the idea that this club wouldn't also be corrupt?

Iraq, Bush & political label confusion.

"If the conservative driven experiment in nation building in Iraq enjoys even modest success in the coming years, it will provide long-term nourishment for progressive ideas in America. And if it fails, as many progressive critics of Operation Iraqi Freedom think it is bound to, it will strengthen over the long haul conservative proclivities in America. To understand these paradoxes, it is necessary to recall the simple truth that is increasingly blurred by the present partisan strife: Most conservatives in America as well as most progressives are small �l� liberals and small �d� democrats .. ". MORE "Political Paradoxes" by Peter Berkowitz, GMU Law School.

As I always ask my lefty friends, "Call yourself a progressive, eh? So where's the progress?" The mistake Berkowitz makes here is to flatter the Left they way the Left attempts to flatter itself -- by conflating the good-government Progressives of 90 years ago (most of whom where Republicans) with the Michael Moore - Tom Hayden - Paul Krugman Left of today. It just won't wash. "Progressives" today are in many ways illiberal and anti-democratic -- hence the twin problems of "political correctness" and Leftist tyrants in robes.

The U.N. & Old Europe.

Anyone know anything about this book: Inside the Asylum: Why the UN and Old Europe are Worse Than You Think by Jed Babbin?

UPDATE: Babbin has an excerpt from his book in today's National Review.

Colby Cosh.

The skinny on the wild Canadian Elections.

Tale of the Tape.

Reconstruction -- Iraq '03 vs. Germany '45. The one that bothered me:

WAR TRIALS: Germany -- 6 MONTHS Iraq -- PENDING

Ralph Peters on Iraq.

LESSONS FOR NEXT TIME. Bullet points: (1) Plan for the worst-case scenario, not just the one you hope for. (2) In the wake of combat operations, always impose martial law. (3) Fight terrorists and insurgents immediately, remorselessly and comprehensively. (4) Kill terrorists, rather than taking them prisoner. (5) Don't treat an occupation as a bonanza for American contractors � hire locals. (6) Don't place blind trust in �migr�s. (7) Preventive War is a concept that's here to stay. (8) The globalized media demands new rules. (9) Ignore the Left. (10) Speak softly, and carry a big stick. (11) Trust the troops.

Quotable: "The hard Left in America has gone European. They live in a fantasy world in which dictators are virtuous as long as they're anti-American. They care nothing for human rights or women's rights � unless Washington can be blamed for abuses, real or imagined .. ".

Steyn blogs the Canadian Election.

" If these numbers hold, we're looking at a Liberal minority government governing well to the left of M Chretien's three ministries. So it's corruption plus socialism .. ". Steyn's election blog.

Canadian Elections.

Colby Cosh is blogging the Canadian Election minute to minute.

Highlight: "5:16 pm Triumph! Beleaguered Conservative Rex Barnes surges to a 33-30 lead over Scott Simms in Bonavista-Exploits! Clearly, a nationwide Conservative sweep is on the cards! ROCK!"

Steyn -- The 9/11 Commission.

"These poseurs have blown it so badly they've become the definitive example of what they're meant to be investigating: a culture so stuck in its way it's unable to change even in the most extreme circumstances .. They were appointed to take a cool, dispassionate look at the government's response to an act of war, but they were unable to rise above the most pointless partisan point-scoring .. ". More STEYN -- "How the Sept. 11 commission blew it".

Perhaps it's time Americans grabbed the microphone and forcefully said, "I paid for this Commission".

Europe -- slacker paradise.

"The average number of hours worked per person aged 15 to 25 each year in France and Germany is about 50 percent lower than in the United States .. course, this 50% figure somewhat overstates the overall labor force comparison, since young people in France and Germany face daunting rates of unemployment, as employers there are most reluctant to add new workers .. when they know that they can�t easily be laid-off, and when every new worker will cost them a huge burden in social welfare taxes and other involuntary expenditure, over and above the hourly wage. Still, losing half of the labor of the most energetic, innovative, and forward-looking segment of the labor force is not a particularly enlightened practice .. ". MORE "Europe doesn�t work".

Saddam asked bin Laden

for help in going after the Saudis.

Greg Packer.

Does it again.

Stephen "The Connection" Hayes

rips 9/11 commissions staffers and their false "no collaborative relationship" claim. The Hayes piece appears on the op/ed page of Michael Kinsley's LA Times, but where the article really belongs is on the front page of that paper -- as a necessary corrective to the erroneous news reporting of the paper on this topic. Even better, I'd like to see Kinsley put in charge of the whole sorry newspaper -- with John Carroll out on the street looking for another lefty paper to edit. UPDATE: Here's a longer piece by Hayes in the Weekly Standard.

Leftist journalism -- bad business for big media.

"Journalists are [more predominately leftists] than [are] voters in the most [leftist] congressional district in the United States, the 9th district in California, which contains the city of Berkeley .. ".

"Among all Americans, those who watch the evening network news regularly have fallen from 60 percent in 1993 to just 34 percent today. Among Republicans, 15 percent or less report watching the evening news on ABC, CBS or NBC .. ".

Professor William Mayer .. suggests that conservatives have adopted talk radio.. as an alternative news outlet .. In Mayer's words, "[Leftists] .. do not need talk radio. They already have Dan Rather, Peter Jennings and Tom Brokaw .. ". More BRUCE BARTLETT.

Al Qaeda and Saddam.

More on the connection. Quotable -- Czech Interior Minister Stanislav Gross: "I believe the counterintelligence services more than I believe journalists."

Foreign nationals are voting

and serving on juries, among other things. Michelle Malkin calls it "The End of American Citizenship".

The coming global power vacuum.

"Why might a power vacuum arise early in the 21st century? The reasons are not especially hard to imagine.

� The clay feet of the colossus. The U.S. suffers from at least three structural deficits that will limit the effectiveness and duration of its crypto-imperial role in the world. The first is the nation's growing dependence on foreign capital to finance excessive private and public consumption. It is difficult to recall any empire that has long endured after becoming so dependent on lending from abroad. ..

� "Old Europe" grows older. Those who dream that the European Union might become a counterweight to the U.S. should continue slumbering. Impressive though the EU's enlargement has been, the reality is that demography likely condemns it to decline in international influence. With fertility rates dropping and life expectancies rising, European societies may, within less than 50 years, display median ages in the upper 40s. Indeed, "Old Europe" will soon be truly old. By 2050, one in every three Italians, Spaniards and Greeks will be 65 or over, even allowing for immigration. Europeans therefore face an agonizing choice between "Americanizing" their economies, i.e., opening their borders to much more immigration, with the cultural changes that would entail, or transforming their union into a fortified retirement community.

MORE --"Without American hegemony the world would likely return to the dark ages" by NIALL FERGUSON.

David Horowitz -- Big Media and

The Big Lie.

Mexico's Fox -- American's need to give more

to Mexican nationals in the U.S.

Bin Laden & Saddam -- "a wealth of evidence".

"A wealth of evidence on the public record � from government reports and congressional testimony to news accounts from major newspapers � attests to longstanding ties between bin Laden and Saddam .. ". More -- "WRONG AGAIN" by RICHARD MINITER.

Gorbachev on Reagan, Russia & the Cold War.

"[The USSR] was being stifled by the lack of freedom .. We were increasingly behind the West, which .. was achieving a new technological era, a new kind of productivity .. And I was ashamed for my country -- perhaps the country with the richest resources on Earth, and we couldn't provide toothpaste for our people."

And this: "I think we all lost the Cold War, particularly the Soviet Union. We each lost $10 trillion .. We only won when the Cold War ended." MORE Gorbachev.

JOHN PATRICK DIGGINS.

Ronald Reagan vs. the Neocons?.

David Yarnold of the Mercury News.

""Find the pro-lifers in a newsroom. That's harder than finding Waldo." link.

Occupation to end?

"The Pentagon has proposed a plan to withdraw its two Army divisions from Germany .. ". MORE "A Pentagon Plan Would Cut Back G.I.'s in Germany".

Steyn on the Saudis.

"The West backs the Saudi regime as a bulwark against local destabilisation, in return for which they underwrite destabilisation of the West across the entire planet".

And this: "The polite thing among the ex-US ambassadors now shilling for Abdullah on various Saudi-funded think tanks is to ignore any statement that any senior prince tells his own people. We�re supposed to agree to overlook what the House of Saud says in Arabic rather than CNN English."

And this: "The war on terror is a Saudi civil war which the Saudis cunningly exported to the rest of the world. The trick now is to gift-wrap it and send it back home marked for the attention of Prince Nayef."

More STEYN.

Did Ike blunder?

"Granted the Allied war aim of unconditional surrender, Hitler would clearly fight on to the end, and that meant we had to destroy his large-scale fighting capacity by breaking up all major units and occupying territory. But how, exactly? Montgomery was all for the rapid thrust by armored divisions deep into Germany, backed by overwhelming air-power. "Berlin by Christmas" was one phrase used. This was a fighting soldier's strategy and one which the Germans, in a similar situation, would certainly have used. Indeed, to some extent it was used by Gen. Patton and his armor. But it was risky. The faster the spearhead moved, the more extended its lines of communication became and the more likely it was that the Germans would be able to mount a devastating lateral attack which might sever the advanced armored units from their tail. In the end, Eisenhower decided it was too risky and overruled Montgomery's enthusiasm. Instead, a "broad front" strategy was adopted, the Allies advancing slowly, steady and always as a continuous mass, forward units never out of touch with their companions to left or right. This virtually ruled out the possibility of German counterattack breaking right through the front and nipping off a spearhead. It was the safe approach, and typical of Eisenhower's minimum-risk attitude to warfare. But of course such an approach involved penalties. It allowed the Germans to keep their line, to regroup and reinforce, and to maintain morale. Not until the very last weeks of the war did their front collapse, and individual units begin to surrender freely. Moreover, the political consequences were enormous. Instead of the war ending in autumn or early winter 1944, it lasted until the end of April 1945. Instead of the U.S. and Britain occupying Berlin and most of central Europe, it left these spoils to the Russians. The broad-front policy set the stage for 40 years of Cold War. Indeed, had it not been for the firmness of President Truman in reversing Roosevelt's policy of appeasing Stalin, it is quite possible that Western Europe too might have fallen victim to communism, and that the frontiers of Stalin's empire would only have ended at the English Channel. More PAUL JOHNSON ON THE LESSONS OF D-DAY.

Al Qaeda plans targetted U.S. border with Mexico.

"Khalid Shaikh Mohammed suggested that they enter the United States by way of Mexico .. and that once in the country, they locate high-rise apartment buildings that had natural gas supplied to all floors, that they rent two apartments in each building, seal those apartments, turn on the gas, and set timers to detonate and destroy the buildings simultaneously at a later time. This was precisely the mission that Padilla and Jafar had trained for, and now Padilla had a new accomplice .. ". More: TRANSCRIPT -- U.S. Deputy Attorney General James Comey.

And from the LA Times: "Padilla was instructed to conduct the operation in the central U.S., along the U.S.-Mexican border, perhaps in Texas or California .. ". Government Says Padilla Plotted High-Rise Attacks.

Mark Steyn.

"There is something not just ridiculous but unbecoming about a hyperpower 300 million strong whose elites .. want the outcome of a war, and the fate of a nation, to hinge on one freaky jailhouse; elites who are willing to pay any price, bear any burden, as long as it's pain-free, squeaky clean and over in a week. The sheer silliness dishonors the memory of all those we're supposed to be remembering this Memorial Day ..". more MARK STEYN.

P.J O'Rourke.

"John Kerry says America shouldn't cut and run .. But we don't have to retreat ignominiously from the war on terrorism and from our other international responsibilities and commitments; we can recuse ourselves .. On every issue of geopolitical adjudication, from 9/11 to the Kyoto Protocol on Climate Change, America is a jury of cops and crime victims. A change in venire has already been called for by noisy street protestors, France and suchlike. Let's accede to the pre-emptory challenge and go home.

The benefits will be immediate. We can cut $300 billion from our defense budget. This will be almost enough to pay for the aging baby boomers' prescription drug benefits, which can now include Levitra, Botox and medicinal cannabis. America will enjoy cleaner air and less traffic congestion as oil goes to $200 a barrel due to chaos in the Middle East. A U.S. withdrawal from the Middle East will cause chaos, of course. Then again, a U.S. intervention in the Middle East has caused chaos already. And, during those periods of history when the U.S. was neither intervening in nor withdrawing from the Middle East, there was . . . chaos. The situation is akin to the famous complaint women have against men: failure to acknowledge that not every problem can be fixed. Sometimes the best thing is just a little sympathy. America had everyone's sympathy after the World Trade towers were attacked. We can get that sympathy back if we limit our foreign policy objectives to whining.

One thing to whine about will be the fate of Israel. Without American safeguards that nation is certain to be militarily attacked. To judge by previous Israeli wars, in 1948, 1956, 1967, 1973 and 1982, the result will be serious headaches for Israelis as the Knesset furiously debates the status of Jewish settlements outside Damascus and on the west bank of the Euphrates .. ". More P.J. O'ROURKE.

Chalabi vs. Bush.

ParaPundit takes a multi-link look at the significance of Chalabi's Deceptions. Must reading for those trying to make sense of the war in Iraq.

Serving & dying in Iraq.

"The average age of servicemen killed in Vietnam was 20, in the Korean War, it was 22. For this war, the average age is 27 .. As devastating as every war casualty is, the impact of casualties from this older fighting force can be especially widespread. "More of them are married, more have children" .. Part of the reason the U.S. fighting force is older is this conflict's heavy reliance on the National Guard and Reserve forces, which make up 46 percent of the 110,000 troops now rotating into Iraq. MORE Older Fighting Force in Iraq Leaves Big Holes Behind.

The World Bank is funding terrorism.

One third of all developmental bank loans end up stolen -- funding thugs, crooks and terrorists.

Interrogation deaths

under investigation.

What you haven't heard

about the Sarin warhead found in Iraq.

The lies of John Carroll, editor of the LA Times.

"[John] Carroll's speech was an attack on Fox News Channel .. Carroll's case-in-chief of Fox News' "pseudo-journalism" is "The O'Reilly Factor." .. Carroll lyingly says of O'Reilly: "Where, he asked, was the L.A. Times on the so-called Troopergate story?" In fact, O'Reilly never mentioned "Troopergate." He didn't mention the Arkansas State Troopers. And he certainly didn't mention "so-called Troopergate." He compared the L.A. Times coverage of Schwarzenegger's alleged inappropriate behavior decades earlier with that paper's coverage of the scandals of various Democrats � among them the stunning, contemporaneous sexual assaults by Bill Clinton on identifiable women. I suppose it's easy to confuse sex scandals involving Bill Clinton � I keep a "Women Bill Clinton Has Raped or Groped at a Glance" file on my Blackberry, just as a time-saver � but O'Reilly was referring not to the 1993 allegations from Arkansas State Troopers, but to the 1998 Clinton sex scandals involving allegations from specific women, such as Kathleen Willey. We know this because while the word "trooper" never passed O'Reilly's lips, he did expressly refer to "Kathleen Willey." .. You don't have to enter the "No Spin Zone" to see the "disconnect," as [leftists] love to say, between the L.A. Times' frantic, wild-eyed search for a woman � any woman, even anonymously � to accuse Schwarzenegger of groping her at some point during the previous quarter century, and the Times' equally determined efforts to discount the many credible accounts of women, all named, who plausibly accused Bill Clinton of raping, groping or otherwise sexually assaulting them .. ". More ANN COULTER.

Economic liberal named India Prime Minister.

"NEW DELHI (AP) - Manmohan Singh, whose humble origins inspired him to start the reforms that opened up India's economy, was named prime minister Wednesday, ending weeks of turmoil that culminated with Sonia Gandhi's refusal to take the post .. Singh, an Oxford-educated economist, emphasized the importance of a healthy capital market, creation of jobs and social development, as he tried to calm investors who have been jittery since the likely makeup of the government became clear. The markets soared at the news that Singh was to take the helm .. As finance minister from 1991-96, Singh had reversed four decades of Soviet-style central planning and control and began easing subsidies, blocks on foreign imports and investment that had nearly brought the economy to a standstill .. " MORE "Economist Named India's Prime Minister".

U.S. Marines on Abu Ghraib -- and the press.

"By GORDON DILLOW -- WITH THE 1ST BATTALION, 5TH MARINE REGIMENT, NEAR FALLUJAH, IRAQ � It was early morning chow time in the 1st Battalion's rear area mess hall, and as Marines fresh in from the field were shoveling down their breakfasts - sausage, cold pancakes and greenish- hued scrambled eggs - CNN's Larry King came on the flickering big-screen TV in the corner. King announced that the subject of his show was, once again, the ongoing prisoner- abuse scandal at Abu Ghraib. And one Marine probably spoke for most Marines here when he shouted at the TV: "Aw, shut the (blank) up!" The Marines here aren't directly connected to the Abu Ghraib abuse scandal. Although these Marines routinely detain and do the initial processing of suspected insurgents, the handling of prisoners at the prison was and is a U.S. Army operation. And given the generations-old rivalry between Marines and soldiers, these Marines express no surprise when the Army stumbles into a minefield, literally or figuratively. But some of the Camp Pendleton-based Marines here do worry that people back home may not make such a distinction, that all U.S. forces will be painted with the same abusive brush. And while every Marine interviewed condemned the abuse of prisoners, almost to a man they think the news media is overhyping the story and losing sight of the big picture of what's going on in Iraq.

"I'm tired of it," says Chief Warrant Officer David Bednarcik, 36, of Temecula. "(The news media) are making us look like a bunch of goons over here. What those (Army) yo-yos did was wrong, and if they're guilty, they deserve to get crushed. But do we really need to keep going on and on and on about it? Can't anybody talk about some of the positive things we're doing here?"

MORE Marines see ripple effect of abuse scandal.

Gordon Dillow, a former OC Register columnist, is reporting from Iraq as a free-lancer. He is embedded with Marines from Camp Pendleton.

WMD's found in Iraq.

Sarin, Mustard Gas found in Iraq. (via Patterico).

Mark Helprin.

"Before the war's inception, and even after September 11, the Bush administration, having promised to correct its predecessor's depredations of the military, failed to do so. The president failed to go to Congress on September 12 to ask for a declaration of war, failed to ask Congress when he did go before it for the tools with which to fight, and has failed consistently to ask the American people for sacrifice. And yet their sons, mainly, are sacrificed in Iraq day by day. When soldiers are killed because they do not have equipment (in the words of a returning officer, "not enough vehicles, not enough munitions, not enough medical supplies, not enough water"), when reservists are retained for years, and rotations canceled, it is the consequence of a fiscal policy that seems more attuned to the electoral landscape of 2004 than to the national security of the United States. Were the U.S. to devote the same percentage of its GNP to defense as it did during the peacetime years of the last half-century, and the military budget return to this unremarkable level, we would be spending (apart from the purely operational costs of the war) almost twice what we are spending now .. ". MORE Mark Helprin.

Mark Steyn.

"Now's not the time for Bush to go soft".

Terror threat -- illegal alien border stampede.

"Confusion over President Bush's proposal to create a guest-worker program for illegal immigrants has fueled a rush across the Southwest border that threatens to overwhelm the U.S. Border Patrol in some areas, agents say in intelligence reports .. ". MORE L.A. Times -- "Border Agents Warn of Influx".

9/11 ringleader meets Iraqis in Prague?

"Important new information has come from Edward Jay Epstein about Mohammed Atta�s contacts with Iraqi intelligence. The Czechs have long maintained that Atta, leader of the 9/11 hijackers in the United States, met with Ahmed al-Ani, an Iraqi intelligence official, posted to the Iraqi embassy in Prague. As Epstein now reports, Czech authorities have discovered that al-Ani�s appointment calendar shows a scheduled meeting on April 8, 2001 with a "Hamburg student." That is exactly what the Czechs had been saying since shortly after 9/11: Atta, a long-time student at Germany�s Hamburg-Harburg Technical University, met with al-Ani on April 8, 2001. Indeed, when Atta earlier applied for a visa to visit the Czech Republic, he identified himself as a �Hamburg student.� The discovery of the notation in al-Ani�s appointment calendar about a meeting with a �Hamburg student� provides critical corroboration of the Czech claim. Epstein also explains how Atta could have traveled to Prague at that time without the Czechs having a record of such a trip. Spanish intelligence has found evidence that two Algerians provided Atta a false passport. MORE "The Saddam-9/11 Link Confirmed".

France attacks EU on farm subsidies.

A free trade breakthrough looks possible, if the EU is willing to piss off the French.

Joe Darby -- Soldier, Hero.

"The military policeman who blew the whistle on fellow soldiers who were photographed abusing Iraqi detainees has an independent streak and knew "right from wrong," say people who know him .. ". MORE "Town lauds soldier who revealed abuse".

Of God, gonads & Iraq.

"�The Jesus Factor,� which aired on Monday, is an hour �documentary� on the role that religion plays in the mind of President Bush. It was produced by the leftwing series �Frontline� for PBS .. In this production, the featured critic of the President�s God-talk on the war was the Reverend Jim Wallis, who explained that calling the enemy �evil� was �bad theology� and in effect un-Christian .. The Frontline documentary failed to mention that Wallis is a liberation theologian .. with a long history of support for Communist causes ..

Watching the program I couldn�t help thinking of Bill Clinton, a president guided not by his God, but by his gonads. I couldn�t help remembering how fiercely the same [leftists] who made �The Jesus Factor� and who are positively phobic about Bush�s Christian faith defended virtually to a man the most irresponsible human being ever to occupy the White House. While Clinton was setting his sights on confused and vulnerable female interns, Osama bin Laden and his fellow Islamic fanatics were actively carrying out their war against American citizens .. ". MORE David Horowitz.

France.

"Going to war without France is like going deer hunting without an accordion. All you do is leave behind a lot of noisy baggage."

Or, better still, the quote from last week's Wall Street Journal: "They're there when they need you." More "Heh".

Pat Tillman struck down in Afghanistan.

Another hero dies defending his nation.

Oil-for-Blood-Money.

"At least three senior United Nations officials are suspected of taking multi-million dollar bribes from the Saddam Hussein regime, U.S. and European intelligence sources tell ABCNEWS. One year after his fall, U.S. officials say they have evidence, some in cash, that Saddam diverted to his personal bank accounts approximately $5 billion from the United Nations Oil-for-Food program .. Most prominent among those accused in the scandal is Benon Sevan, the Cyprus-born U.N. undersecretary general who ran the program for six years .. documents have surfaced in Baghdad, in the files of the former Iraqi Oil Ministry, allegedly linking Sevan to a pay-off scheme in which some 270 prominent foreign officials received the right to trade in Iraqi oil at cut-rate prices .. [Including] Charles Pasqua, former [French] minister of interior [and] Bernard Merimee, former French ambassador to the United Nations .. ". More "U.N. Officials Bribed by Saddam".

The U.N.'s blood money.

"The U.N. began the Oil-for-Food program after the first Gulf War to provide humanitarian relief for the people of Iraq. Saddam Hussein was to sell Iraqi oil, two-thirds of the proceeds of which would be used to buy food and medicine, generate electricity, build houses and help the country recover. The U.N. would get a 2.2% fee on each barrel of oil sold. But with Saddam running the program and the U.N. only pretending to pay attention, corruption quickly dominated the process. Saddam added a 20-cent kickback fee to every barrel sold, which soon became 30, then 50 and finally 70 cents a barrel. Add to that the profit from Iraqi oil smuggled to Syria, Turkey and Jordan, and kickbacks on the humanitarian materials shipped into Iraq, and Saddam was raking in as much as $2.5 billion each year in illicit revenue to build up his military, his palaces and his power. The U.S. General Accounting Office estimates Saddam's total illegal revenues from the Oil-for-Food program to have totaled more than $10 billion. Why would the U.N. delegate total, unsupervised authority to run the program to Saddam? Perhaps because Iraq and the other nations whose companies were participating in the scam didn't want appropriate procedures and controls applied to their ventures. Teresa Raphael, the editorial page editor of The Wall Street Journal Europe, has seen a spreadsheet listing the companies Saddam had approved for oil purchases. It included 11 French middleman concerns, (150 million barrels sold to them), 14 companies in Syria (120 million) and dozens of Russian firms (more than a billion barrels), the president of Indonesia, the Palestine Liberation Organization, "the director of the Russian president's office" and former French foreign minister Charles Pasqua. Most stunning is Benon Sevan, the U.N.'s assistant secretary-general, whom his boss, Kofi Annan, designated to run the Oil-for-Food program. Mr. Sevan was allocated 14 million barrels of oil and disposed of 7 million of them. As all this information became public over the past year or so, U.N. lawyers refused to allow identification of the kickback firms; it was, they said, "privileged information which could not be made public." Mr. Annan then suggested "an independent high-level inquiry" to clean up the U.N.'s sordid image. Absolutely not, said France's U.N. ambassador, Jean-Marc de la Sabiliere, for the U.N. Iraqi accounts were managed by a French company, BNP Paribas .. ". More on "Oil-for-Food" at the U.N.. UPDATE: Wat it Oil-for-Terror?

Awaiting the boomer die-off.

"The first George Bush once said he thought the Persian Gulf War would cure America of the Vietnam syndrome. He was wrong. There is no cure for the Vietnam syndrome. It will go away only when the baby boom generation does, dying off like the Israelites in the desert, allowing a new generation, cleansed of the memories and the guilt, to look at the world clearly once again .. ". More CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER

Scott Ritter got Saddam Oil Money.

Former U.N. weapons inspector Scott Ritter received $400,000 from a U.N. "Oil-For-Food" profiteer with ties to the Saddam Hussein regime. In other words, blood money.

Ann Coulter.

"Last week, 9-11 commissioner John Lehman revealed that "it was the policy (before 9-11) and I believe remains the policy today to fine airlines if they have more than two young Arab males in secondary questioning because that's discriminatory." Hmmm ... Is 19 more than two? Why, yes, I believe it is. So if two Jordanian cab drivers are searched before boarding a flight out of Newark, Osama bin Laden could then board that plane without being questioned. I'm no security expert, but I'm pretty sure this gives terrorists an opening for an attack. In a sane world, Lehman's statement would have made headlines across the country the next day. But not one newspaper, magazine or TV show has mentioned that it is official government policy to prohibit searching more than two Arabs per flight .. ". More ANN COULTER.

You're FIRED.

"Jamie Gorelick should step down from the [9/11] commission at once. If she fails to do so on her own, her fellow commissioners should ask her to step aside. Her role as the architect of a policy that hampered the work of federal agents to track down suspected terrorists makes her unfit to pass judgment on the alleged failures of others .. ". More Linda Chavez

Steyn - Americanism vs. British Imperialism .. and those damn Frenchmen.

"When you look at the current hotspots of the Islamist threat � Iraq, the Khyber Pass, Kashmir, the West Bank, Sudan � America is spending a lot of time mopping up the failures of British imperialism � or, to be more charitable, of late-period fag-end fainthearted British imperialism. Eight decades ago, London botched the birth of both Iraq and Palestine because of excessive deference to the modish transnational umbrella of the day � League of Nations "Mandates". Then, as now, the tricky business was keeping the French on side: in the Colonial Office memoranda of the day, certain phrases recur like the haunting refrain of a gloomy chanson on an old 78 with the needle stuck � Emir Faisal assures Sir Herbert Samuel, High Commissioner for Palestine, that "he does not wish to complicate matters between the British and the French"; the Cabinet Finance Committee instructs Sir Percy Cox, High Commissioner for Mesopotamia, to avoid "antagonising the French". The lessons of the 1920s are as pertinent for Guardianesque transnationalists as for Rumsfeldian neocons .. ". More MARK STEYN.

FAILING THE USS COLE.

Blogger Thomas Galvin has an indepth report tracking what happened and what we knew day by day, week by week. A remarkable story and a remarkable piece of research.

Those who died.

It's Vietnam flashbacks all over again.

"When I was in college, El Salvador was Vietnam. When I was in Washington, Kuwait was Vietnam. Afghanistan was briefly Vietnam when we hadn�t won the war after a week. It�s Warholian: in the future, all conflicts will be Vietnam for 15 minutes.

Vietnam was an anomaly. Vietnam was perhaps the least typical war we�ve ever fought, but somehow it�s become the Gold Standard for wars � because, one suspects, it became inextricably bound up with Nixon, that black hole of human perfidy, and it coincided with the golden glory years of so many old boomers who now clog the arteries of the media and academe .. ". More LILEKS.

Jean-Francois Revel's "Anti-Americanism".

"The reason that Revel's attitude toward the US is so strikingly different from most of his compatriots is not difficult to find: indeed, one finds it on the very first page of this book, when the author reveals that he lived and traveled frequently in the US between 1970 and 1990. During this time, he had conversations with "a wide range of Americans - politicians, journalists, businessmen, students and university professors, Democrats and Republicans, conservatives, liberals and radicals, and people I met in passing from every walk of life". This simple action - talking to actual Americans and asking them what they think, as opposed to blindly regurgitating European conventional wisdom about what Americans think - was obviously the critical step in separating Revel from the smug, chauvinistic sheep who predominate in his intellectual class .. ". More BOOK REVIEW -- Anti-Americanism by Jean-Francois Revel.

Corrupt Europe.

Now it's the head of the Bundesbank.

France.

"French dirigisme is saved from the utter disaster that Americans often predict for it by the relentless intellectual elitism of its educational system .. The famous grandes �coles are designed to produce a competent, if arrogant, elite, who are destined from their early adulthood to control everything from politics to telecommunications .. ". From a review of the book Sixty Million Frenchmen Can't Be Wrong : Why We Love France but Not the French

Richard Clarke.

"the climactic confession ``I failed you'' -- the one that packed the emotional punch -- was entirely disingenuous. Clarke did the mea culpa then spent the next 2 1/2 hours of testimony -- as he did on every talk show known to man and in the 300 pages of his book -- demonstrating how everyone else except Richard Clarke had failed .. Clarke's clever pseudo-apology -- we failed, meaning, they failed -- played perfectly to the families in the gallery, who applauded and warmly embraced the very man who for 12 years was the U.S. government official most responsible for preventing a Sept. 11. A neat trick .. ". more Charles Krauthammer.

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS.

On Fallujah and the war.

The Iraq - Terror Connection.

"The Benjamin-Simon book [The Age of Sacred Terror] contains a long account of the first bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993 and also a stern defense of Clinton's decision in August 1998 to hit the Al-Shifa pharmaceutical plant in Sudan with cruise missiles. What is interesting is the strong Iraqi footprint that is to be found in both episodes. Abdul Rahman Yasin, one of the makers of the bomb that exploded at the World Trade Center, was picked up by the FBI, questioned, and incredibly enough released pending further interrogation as a "cooperative witness." He went straight to Amman and thence to Baghdad, where he remained under Saddam Hussein's protection until last year. As Clarke told the Sept. 11 commission last week: "The Iraqi government didn't cooperate in turning him over and gave him sanctuary, as it did give sanctuary to other terrorists." That's putting it mildly, when you recall that Abu Nidal's organization was a wing of the Baath Party, and that the late Abu Abbas of Klinghoffer fame was traveling on an Iraqi diplomatic passport. But, hold on a moment�doesn't every smart person know that there's no connection between Saddam Hussein and the world of terror? ..

One of the crucial reasons for apathy and inaction, in both the Clinton and Bush administrations, was the fact that two of the prime movers in jihad sponsorship, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, were considered official "friends," not least by the American intelligence "community." An unnoticed benefit of regime change in Afghanistan and Iraq is the extent to which both the Pakistani and Saudi oligarchies have been "turned" .. ". more CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS.

Iraq.

"We moved against Iraq for what turned out to be the wrong reason and it's probably the only reason that would have gotten international action. That is a damning charge against Western democracy which we deserve to think about long and hard .. ". -- David Kay.

George Shultz - Defending the State System.

Amidst the caterwauling of a thousand pygmies GEORGE SHULTZ cuts through to what matters. Compare Shultz to the utterly cynical child talk of former President Clinton. OK, spare yourself, and simply enjoy uncynical foreign policy talk for grown ups.

Europe.

The new haven for Islamifacists.

Quotable Stein.

"In October 2000, Clarke and Special Forces Colonel Mike Sheehan leave the White House after a meeting to discuss al-Qa'eda's attack on the USS Cole: "'What's it gonna take, Dick?' Sheehan demanded. 'Who the s*** do they think attacked the Cole, f****** Martians? The Pentagon brass won't let Delta go get bin Laden. Does al-Qa'eda have to attack the Pentagon to get their attention?'" Apparently so. The attack, on the Cole, which killed 17 US sailors, was deemed by Clinton's Defence Secretary Bill Cohen as "not sufficiently provocative" to warrant a response. You'll have to do better than that, Osama! So he did .. ". more MARK STEYN.

Footnote: I served on a ship identical to the USS Cole. I've never been able to accept the fact that the President and the Pentagon believed that the men of the Cole were not worth defending, were not worth bring justice for ..

Imagine letting an enemy attack your warship and you do nothing, again -- an enemy which has publicly declared war against you. What kind of military of officer would sit back and allow that? What kind of commander in chief would say "go ahead, kill my sailors, attack my forces, I'll just look the other way"? It's unbelievable that this actually happened, and that we are talking about Americans here. Not Frenchmen. Not Spaniards. Americans.

While America Slept.

"For more than a decade, I felt I was a voice in the wilderness, warning whomever I could reach that the Jihadists were marching towards this country .. I observed the clouds gathering in Khartoum in 1992, when terrorists from all walks of life were assembled by Hassan Turabi to consult on the next world target. The Egyptian Islamic Jihad, Hamas, Hizbollah and those men who would later form al Qaida were sitting shoulder to shoulder with Mujahideen from Chechnia to Algeria. On the menu: how to defeat the United States. I read about these meetings by purchasing the daily Arabic al Hayat, in subtropical Miami. But the mainstream press in Washington missed what was to come. The holy war machinery was moving, while America slept tight.

�We started to hear about al Qaida around 1994,� said Richard Clarke. �Err, I began to know about them around 1996,� admitted former secretary Madeleine Albright. In the MSNBC studios where I was glued on the TV screen, I sat in disbelief. This country was at war and it didn't even know? ..

After the first Twin Towers attacks in New York in 1993 and the Khobar Towers operation in 1996, Washington sends in the FBI for forensics. The same year, the Taliban takes over Kabul, and al Qaida forms training camps around that poor country. The US dispatches the diplomats to Riyadh instead for mediation. �The infidels are intimidated,� Usama Bin Laden told Western journalists the following year. �Their soldiers can't fight, their Government is on the run,� asserted the commander of the believers on al Jazeera later ..

Ironically, he had the courtesy to inform the United States of his intention. On February 22, 1998, the bearded man declared war. The Clinton administration obviously didn't hear this declaration. In August, Bin Laden�s organization destroyed two American embassies in East Africa. This time, the White House had to respond. The world .. was wondering why Washington wasn't using its power to protect its own citizens. Two missiles landed on a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan and thirty Tomahawks dug the rocks of Afghanistan. The Taliban readied themselves for the encounter with the Marines but no marching orders were issued across the Potomac.

In 2000, the USS Cole was hit in Yemen. This time, neither the Seals were deployed nor the Cruise missiles were fired. �The international situation could have gotten complicated,� theorized Secretary Albright at the hearings. �We should not be emotional,� rationalized Secretary Cohen. �We had no compelling evidence,� said Dick Clarke.

At the 9/11 hearings, Senator Kerrey .. wondered how al Qaida operatives crossed �all layers of American defense.� .. the truth is not so difficult to understand. Al Qaida did not force its way onto our mainland; it was invited in ..

�How would you know what�s on al Qaida�s mind,� said Secretary Albright at the hearings. That sentence alone should summarize the proceedings of the commission .. ". more WALID PHARES.

France.

"Timmerman .. demonstrates in striking detail how France morphed into an exceedingly corrupt corporate state: fascism with a friendly face. The French willingness to put its corporatist interests above all other concerns resulted in their encouraging Saddam Hussein to wipe out the Marsh Arabs at the behest of French contractors. The French refused to send engineers into an area where they might be kidnapped, "so they suggested that the Iraqis 'clean up' the area ahead of time," Timmerman reports. The Iraqis did just that and "some three hundred thousand marsh Arabs were sent into forced exile in Iran, their way of life gone forever." more NICK SCHULZ. From a review of The French Betrayal of America. (via InstaPundit).

Put a Fork in Richard Clarke.

A writer at TIME takes a stab. No, I don't think Clarke is credible. What he's said about Rice and Bush patently isn't credible. Here's my take on what is going on. Thousands died on Clarke's watch, and he's understably uncomfortable with letting the full blame fall at his own feet (via Clinton). I mean, he's the one who warned everybody, right? Well, he knew the threat -- and year after year after year he worked for a President who utterly failed to respond to that threat. And Clarke says himself that he would spin to protect the top guys -- which means he cared more for his own employment than for the truth or the safety of the country. It's hard not to get the feeling that there is something wrong with this man -- and I think what we are seeing is the public meltdown of a man suffering an unbearable case of what the professors call "cognitive dissonance". It's predictable human nature, but it isn't pretty and it isn't admirable.

UPDATE: Don't miss today's CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER. Quotable: "The 1990s were al Qaeda's springtime: Blissfully unmolested in Afghanistan, it trained, indoctrinated, armed and, most fatally, planned. For the United States, this was a catastrophic lapse, and in a March 2002 interview on PBS's "Frontline," Clarke admitted as much: "I believe that, had we destroyed the terrorist camps in Afghanistan earlier, that the conveyor belt that was producing terrorists, sending them out around the world would have been destroyed." Instead, "now we have to hunt [them] down country by country." What should we have done during those lost years? Clarke answered: "Blow up the camps and take out their sanctuary. Eliminate their safe haven, eliminate their infrastructure. . . . That's . . . the one thing in retrospect I wish had happened." It did not. And who was president? Bill Clinton. Who was the Clinton administration's top counterterrorism official? Clarke. He now says that no one followed his advice. Why did he not speak out then? And if the issue was as critical to the nation as he now tells us, why didn't he resign in protest? ...

Clarke is clearly an angry man, angry that Condoleezza Rice demoted him, angry that he was denied a coveted bureaucratic job by the Bush administration. Angry and unreliable. He told the commission to disregard what he said in his 2002 briefing because he was, in effect, spinning. "I've done it for several presidents," he said. He's still at it, spinning now for himself".

UPDATE: Dean Esmay makes an important point:

Most disturbing to me in all this is something too few people have noted. Clarke seems like a fairly typical career civil servant who is neither appointed nor elected. Such people tend to become fairly narrow-minded, inflating the importance of their own role, and also resentful of the "big vision" folks--i.e. the elected and appointed officials who have to tie together broad policy positions involving far more than one civil servant's specialty. This is pretty normal, but now, all future administrations are going to have to worry that the career civil servants whose job is to give them information and advice will try to make them look stupid ..

If our governing officials can no longer trust the people who work for them, this is not a good thing. Because we're not talking about blowing the whistle on criminal activity here: we're talking about policy debates, and a career civil servant deciding he doesn't like the strategies formulated by the people he works for--and being treated like a hero by partisans who just don't happen to like the people in office right now.

Very unhealthy, very dangerous in the long run.

Yes, very.

U.S. Army.

U.S. will cut German force in half. "We've got your back" -- for nearly 60 years that's what America said to Germany. But then it came Germany's turn ..

Clarke vs. Clarke.

FOXNews -- FOXNews.com - Politics - Transcript: Clarke Praises Bush Team in '02.

Wolfowitz vs. Clarke.

Paul Wolfowitz takes on Richard Clarke.

Germany.

"There is almost no area where Germany stands out with its achievements .. " " .. when you talk about the future, about future technology and future knowledge, nobody thinks of Germany first .. " -- Germany's leaders expressing the current Germany malaise. Quotable: "Germany could potentially be following the pattern of the United States after the Carter malaise and Britain in the depressing years before Margaret Thatcher in opting for a conservative revolution."

Mass Murder.

Horror in the Sudan.

Terrorism & Richard Clarke.

I think we can all agree to this: "The message is that the United States' mechanisms -- the CIA, the FBI, the DOD, the White House -- failed during both the Clinton administration and the Bush administration .. " -- part of Richard Clarke's reply to his Bush administration critics.

War Protest.

Citizen Smash attends an anti-war rally.

France.

Unemployment, rundown public housing, a corrupt political culture, immigration, the failed promise of socialism all fuel the rise of the Popular Front -- today with a new female face -- as the French go to the polls in regional elections. Quotable: "Amid the run-down housing estates of Ile de France, a battered Socialist campaign bus flies the familiar red flag ..". MORE.

Jean-Fran�ois Revel.

"Europe, capitale Al-Qaeda". Read French? Read the article. Don't read French? Read the English translation. (via Institut Hayek).

China.

Why China values the small stuff and has no time for Big Abstract Ideas. Quotable: "Making money, sending my kids to good schools, buying a home and a car become, in this view, virtuous precisely because they are Small Ideas. These decisions do not reorder society according to some abstract ideal, but they do improve your own personal life in very concrete ways .. ".

Your Tax Dollars at Work.

Your taxes are enormous. Well, what the hell does George Bush and the Congress do with all that money? Well, one thing they do, is they ship it off to the IMF, which then gives it away to places like Argentina, a country run by ideological kooks and incompetents. There's no reason to be happy with Bush or the Congress about this. Here is more about the IMF and Argentina's mismanaged government. Quotable: "Throughout almost the entire period .. the present Buenos Aires has been subject to Fund assistance and oversight. From the outset the relationship can best be portrayed as one between an alcoholic and bartender, with the latter (the IMF) unwilling or unable to temper the former's (Argentina) zeal for binge drinking (borrowing) .. a nascent central bank charged with rescuing feckless governments and the private international financial institutions that underwrite sovereign debts, the IMF accomplishes its mission by funneling member state contributions (quotas) to distressed borrowers, in the process imbuing moral hazard in both parties. In other words, this international organization lends contributions supplied by governments, whose quotas are met via the involuntary confiscation of property (taxation), to recipient states in order that the beneficiaries continue to service public debts to private lenders, also a nefarious compact that entails violating the property rights of a third party. This facet of the international financial architecture is nothing more than systematic pilfering."

In short, Bush and the Congress steal your money and give it to Citibank and the Argentinians. True and truly outrageous.

Ann Coulter.

"After the Madrid bombings, it looks like liberals and terrorists will have to powwow on whether there was an Iraq /al-Qaida link. Two hundred dead Spaniards say there was .. ". more COULTER.

Well, if there wasn't then, there is now.

Ram�n Humberto Col�s Castillo.

Free minds and free libraries -- in Cuba. (via Conservatorblog).

Victory.

Today's Ramirez.

Rather Biased.

Which TV news broadcast pushes its role as a cell of the Democrat Party hardest -- ABC, NBC, or CBS?

Haiti. "If there was one moment when recent U.S. Haitian policy went wrong, it might have been in 1993 when Bill Clinton was considering whether or not to restore the exiled former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide by force of American arms. Aristide had a well-earned reputation for thuggish tactics and emotional instability. Huddled with top aide George Stephanopoulos, Clinton briefly considered and then dismissed a CIA report that Aristide is a manic depressive. "You know," Clinton said, "you can make too much of normalcy." .. ". more RICH LOWRY.

Iraq & Liberty. Tom Palmer -- just back from Iraq -- is setting up an Iraqi think tank which will promote liberal institutions and a free society in that country. Palmer has lined up a major donor to help launch the thing for one year -- but what he needs now are lots of smaller donors. Send him a few bucks if you're so inclined.

Religion. It's not just a Mel Gibson thing -- The Passion of the Muslims.

Terror War. "A Primer on the Future Threat" -- a classified document "used actively today" by Sec. Rumsfeld and summarized as part of the latest excerpt from Rumsfeld's War in today's Washington Times. Highlight -- bullet point classified weapons intelligence and terror predictions.

Track & Kill. Inside Rumsfeld's War. Here's the book.

Iraq. Larry Diamond on the Rise of Civil Society in Iraq. Out of Chaos, the flowering of Liberal Democracy -- it ain't always pretty, but it is beautiful. Something Diamond doesn't mention -- the marketplace is booming, and cell phone use has exploded. Good news for Liberal Democracy.

UPDATE: Tom Palmer -- a one man think tank -- bring the world of liberal ideas to Iraq. Interesting stuff. Quotable:

My remarks will focus on two themes. First, the importance of education in changing expectations .. Second, the necessity of fashioning an Iraqi historical narrative of the struggle of liberty and law against unconstrained power. Since the meeting will take place in the Gilgamesh Room of the conference center, I�ll mention the Epic of Gilgamesh (and the role of Enkidu in limiting the arbitrary power of the king), the first written expression of the idea of liberty (ama-gi in Sumerian; my tattoo was taken from a clay tablet found in the city of Lagash [contemporary Telloh] around 2300 BCE), the code of Hamurrabi, the role of the Baghdad Caliphate (destroyed in the Mongol invasion of 1258), and so forth. It�s important that liberty be seen to have native roots and the story of liberty against power to be an Iraqi story. Otherwise, it�s unlikely that liberty and the rule of law will grow and flourish here.

(via The Agitator).

Canada. "The new revelations don't merit the term 'scandal' so much as 'sin crying to heaven for vengeance.' .. Some would have you believe that the actual theft that the program proved to involve is the only "scandal" here .. I see more like three or four: It was a bad idea, badly executed for bad reasons by despicable people .. " MORE Colby Cosh.

Quotable Steyn:

Let's go back to Triumph the dog's contention that Quebec men are mostly homosexual. In 1991, Edith Cresson made the same allegation against the British. At the time, she was the prime minister of France. In other words, she wasn't just Conan O'Brien's hand puppet; she was President Mitterrand's hand puppet. And she was flesh and blood, which was indeed the main basis of her assertion: She claimed that as a vibrant sensual woman she found more men came on to her in the streets of Paris than London and concluded from this that Englishmen were obviously gay. Instead of falling into po-faced whining like the Toronto Star, Britain's Sun ran a picture of two Frenchmen carrying those dinky little male purses they're partial to over there, under the headline: "They Don't Call It Gay Paree For Nothing." Instead of huffing and puffing about "racist filth" like Canadian Members of Parliament, one British MP attempted to introduce the following motion: "This House does not fancy elderly French women." That's the way a mature, confident society deals with such provocations--with cheap jokes and extensive lists of "Famous French Poofs"--not the reflexive cringe that cries "racism" and calls for "hate crimes" investigations .. MORE Steyn

Foreign Aid. More aid, more poverty. Quotable: "Peter Bauer .. described foreign aid as 'taxing poor people in rich countries and passing it on to rich people in poor countries.' .. A growing body of evidence suggests that far from helping the poor countries, foreign aid slows economic reform and retards growth .. Africa, for example, has been the largest recipient of foreign aid .. As a result, Africa today accounts for a greater percentage of the world's poor than ever before. In 1970, only one in 10 poor people lived in Africa. Today that number is one in two .. Foreign aid also fuels corruption among African officials .. A study commissioned by the African Union in 2001 estimates that corruption continues to cost Africa $150 billion per year .. ".

And guess what? "The United States [has] chosen to ignore those studies .. President George W. Bush promised to spend $5 billion on a new foreign aid initiative known as the Millennium Challenge Account."

Outsourcing. "The reason American jobs and companies jump the frontier is because .. the conduct of business there gets more and more onerous, thanks to such factors as the excessive Federal regulation favoured by Kerry .. and the exposure to massive lawsuits favoured by his principal rival for the Democratic nomination, the pretty-boy trial lawyer John Edwards .. ". More -- not to be missed -- Mark Steyn.

The World. A conversation between Samuel Huntington & Anthony Giddens. Quotable:

Huntington: "The extent to which communal violence in today's world involves Muslims is striking: The Economist identified 32 major conflicts going on in the world in the year 2000, and if you look at those 32 conflicts more than two-thirds involve Muslims fighting other Muslims or Muslims fighting non-Muslims."

Giddens: "I think Max Weber .. got it right when he argued that the origin of the West is fundamentally to be traced to the rule of law, and especially the impersonal rule of law. No other cultures had the impersonal rule of law and it is from this that a great deal of civil liberties stem."

Krauthammer on Global Freedom as American Foreign Policy -- the 2004 AEI Irving Kristol Lecture. Quotable:

Democratic globalism sees as the engine of history not the will to power but the will to freedom. And while it has been attacked as a dreamy, idealistic innovation, its inspiration comes from the Truman Doctrine of 1947, the Kennedy inaugural of 1961, and Reagan�s �evil empire� speech of 1983. They all sought to recast a struggle for power between two geopolitical titans into a struggle between freedom and unfreedom, and yes, good and evil .. ".

And this:

democratic globalism is an improvement over realism. What it can teach realism is that the spread of democracy is not just an end but a means, an indispensable means for securing American interests. The reason is simple. Democracies are inherently more friendly to the United States, less belligerent to their neighbors, and generally more inclined to peace ..

The War. "The single most puzzling -- and arguably most important -- question of the day is the one no one raises in public: Why have we not been attacked again? .. ". -- MORE Charles Krauthammer.

Richard Lamm on immigration -- the ultimate environmental issue.

War & Deceit. "The Democrats� personal attack on the President over the war is not only imprudent; it is also unprecedented .. It is a campaign that apparently knows no limits, adopting tactics that are as unscrupulous as they are reckless .. ". MORE David Horowitz.

U.S.A. Decay?. "The one thing you learn from history is that inattention to national finances is the surest sign of decay in global power. No one can be for long-term deficits and the war on terror. They negate each other. When people tell me to forget the debt because the war on terror trumps everything else, they are missing the fact that the deficit will kill this war sooner than any Baathist insurgent. The struggle abroad desperately requires reform and sacrifice at home .. " -- MORE Andrew Sullivan

American business journalism is being offshored to India. As Daniel Drezner points out, expect this issue to become a much, much bigger story now that it touches the financial wellbeing of the journalists who generate the news.

"Thousands of illegal immigrants, mostly from Central and South America, are being released into the USA almost immediately after they are picked up by the Border Patrol ... " -- USA Today. And this: "U.S. officials acknowledge [that the catch and release policy] represents a significant gap in homeland security."

Immigration. Memo to Tyler Cowen -- all of these things are already evident in Southern California. Cowen writes:

Let us think about immigration policy in general terms. Here are some basic options: 1. Let everyone in. ... Start with #1 .. which to my mind won't work in today's world. I do favor increased levels of immigration, but not laissez-faire. What are the problems?

a. American cities and suburbs would become ringed with shantytowns
b. American hospitals and medical facilities would become overburdened
c. Some immigrants would pose threats to public order
d. Assimilation might become more difficult, as the numbers of immigrants from each region increase
e. The political backlash would be enormous

In fact, (1) the borders are pretty much open to unlimited immigration along the California-Mexico border. (a) The San Diego Union-Tribune and other papers have documented a large population of immigrants living in canyons, open fields, and elsewhere. (b) The LA Times has an article about every other week on our hospital system in crisis. The problem is widely evident to everyone. You can't go to an emergency room anywhere in Southern California and not wait for hours to see a doctor. (c) The prisons in Southern California are stuffed to the gills with non-native Americans. Soon the non-native prison population will pass 50 percent. And it is against LA police department policy to pick up a convicted and deported felon loitering on the street -- nasty known criminals organized in street gangs. This is the daily topic of KFI radio hosts John and Ken, who have an audience larger than the circulation of the LA Times.(d) Finally, the political backlash in California has been enormous -- we just turned out a governor, as much because of the budget busting cost of illegals and because of his signing of a drivers licences bill for illegals as for any other reason.

So folks living outside of California are just not living in reality when it comes to the future American crisis of continued overwhelming and ever accelerating immigration. I do, however, agree with Cowen when he writes:

If America becomes too much like the dark side of Brazil, our broader freedoms might erode. Healthy societies require a certain degree of consilience between cultural, economic, and political power.

Bush is scrapping plans to take the Iraqi oil industry out of the socialist sector and move it into the private property sector. The plan now is to stick with socialist control of the largest industry in Iraq.

UPDATE: Don't miss Robert Tagorda's commentary with additional context on this story.

The biggest news since the capture of Saddam -- the bribe list of the butcher's bought friends in France, Russian, Britian, and Indonesia, etc. Bribery reaching to the very top in many of those countries. It's a corrupt world out their, folks, and never forget it.

I agree with Charles Krauthammer, but this is not the case Bush made to the American people (and there's the rub). Quotable:

Until Bush got serious, threatened war and massed troops in Kuwait, the U.N. was headed toward loosening and ultimately lifting sanctions, which would have given Saddam carte blanche to regroup and rebuild his WMDs. Bush reversed that slide with his threat to go to war. But that kind of aggressive posture is impossible to maintain indefinitely. A regime of inspections, embargo, sanctions, no-fly zones and thousands of combat troops in Kuwait was an unstable equilibrium. The U.S. could have either retreated and allowed Saddam free rein -- or gone to war and removed him. Those were the only two ways to go. Under the circumstances, and given what every intelligence agency on the planet agreed was going on in Iraq, the president made the right choice, indeed the only choice.

According to Mark Krikorian a Congressman lectured witnesses today during hearings on immigration that "meatpackers need alien labor because 'we can't get enough people to work for $7 or $8 dollars an hour.'" Note well -- when I worked in a meatpacking plant 20 years ago I was being paid $8.50 an hour, starting pay. Think of that. 20 years of breakneck inflation, and wages remain unchanged. Even back then a good 1/3 of the labor force was non-American. Krikorian notes that a former INS policy director, Stuart Anderson, is now head of a group promoting open borders. Unbelievable. The guy was also once director of immigration policy for the Senate Immigration Subcommittee. And he styles himself as some sort of "libertarian" (he once worked at CATO). Remind me to write some time on the unbroken stream of fallacies contained within the "libertarian" open borders ideology.

UPDATE: Krikorian fisks the WSJ editorial page on immigration, and identifies its writers as "utopian ideologues: [with] an unwillingness to acknowledge facts that are inconsistent with infallible theory." Sounds about right.

I don't do much in the way of "war blogging", but if you are at all interested in the great WMD mudwrestle, don't miss Jonah Goldberg's Memo to the President.

The President's top policy advisors laugh at the very idea of enforcing America's immigration laws. Quotable:

[The advisor's] dismissal of the very idea of immigration-law enforcement confirms the worst fears of observers inside and outside the immigration agencies ..

What's unique about the immigration bureaucracy is that no one in the political elite wants it to work properly

U.S. border agents vs. Bush on Bush's open borders plan. Why should we show up to work in the morning? agents ask. Quotable:

[Border agents report] evidence that an immigration wave already had begun [in response to Bush's open borders proposal]. People recently detained along the border, the agents said, have demanded "amnesty" upon their capture ...

And this from the San Diego Union-Tribune:

Of 162 people stopped for using phony documents at San Ysidro since Bush announced his plan on Jan. 7, 94 said they were trying to enter because of the proposed new work program .. [and] Border Patrol officials have reported a 15 percent increase in the use of phony documents at the San Ysidro port compared with the same period a year ago.

Note well -- the first quote is from an LA Times news story (!), the first ever heard of on the problem of illegal immigration from a paper which is popularly know as The Left Angeles Times.

The Federal government leaves previously convicted and deported criminal illegal aliens on the streets of America, where they have returned to prey upon U.S. citizens -- an LA cop reports:

In New York, as in Los Angeles and many other cities, locally enacted sanctuary laws prohibit police officers from inquiring into a person's immigration status except in extraordinary circumstances. In Los Angeles, this prohibition goes to the laughable extreme of protecting even those who have already been deported after being convicted of a felony and serving time in a California prison. Thus, as I have experienced, if a police officer is driving down the street and spots a man whom he has arrested in the past, and who he knows has been sent to prison and then deported, he is constrained from making an arrest or even a detention, this despite the fact that re-entry into the United States under such circumstances is a federal felony. And on those occasions when I have arrested previously deported aliens for misdemeanors or nonviolent felonies (drug dealing, for instance), immigration officials have told me they would not pursue federal charges unless the underlying local charge was more serious. In fact, it is frustratingly common for police officers to find on an arrestee's rap sheet the notation "deportation proceedings initiated," prompting the question: Well, then, why is he here? ..

The editors of the LA Times are either listening to the John and Ken Show -- or they're reading blogs like this one. Well, I don't think there is much chance they're listening to John and Ken .. Anyway, I don't know how it happened, but part of this Heather Mac Donald's City Journal piece somehow showed up on the editorial pages of the LA Times today. Who would have thunk? Quotable:

Some of the most dangerous thugs preying on immigrant communities in Los Angeles are in this country illegally. Yet the Los Angeles Police Department cannot use the most obvious tool to apprehend them: their immigration status.

Dozens of gang members from Mara Salvatrucha, a ruthless Salvadoran prison gang, for example, have sneaked back into town after having been deported for such crimes as murder, assault with a deadly weapon and drug trafficking. Police officers know who they are and know that their mere presence in the country after deportation is a felony. Yet if an LAPD officer arrests an illegal gangbanger for felonious reentry, it is the officer who will be treated as a criminal for violating an LAPD rule.

That rule, Special Order 40, prohibits officers from questioning or apprehending someone only for an immigration violation or from notifying the immigration service (now known as Immigration and Customs Enforcement) about an illegal alien. Only if the person has been booked for a nonimmigration felony or multiple misdemeanors may officers even inquire about his immigration status.

Such "sanctuary" rules, replicated in cities with a high number of immigrants, are a testament to the political power of immigrant lobbies. "We can't even talk about" illegal alien crime, a frustrated LAPD captain said. "People are afraid of a backlash from Hispanics."

Police commanders may not want to discuss the illegal-alien crisis, but its magnitude for law enforcement is startling: 95% of all outstanding warrants for homicide in Los Angeles (which total more than 1,200) are for illegal aliens, according to officers. Up to two-thirds of all fugitive felony warrants (which total 17,000) are for illegal aliens. The leadership of the Columbia Li'l Cycos gang, which has used murder and racketeering to control the drug market around MacArthur Park, was about 60% illegal aliens in 2002, says a former assistant U.S. attorney who prosecuted them in 2002.

Good luck finding any reference to such facts in "official" crime analysis. The LAPD and the Los Angeles city attorney recently obtained a preliminary injunction against drug trafficking in Hollywood. The injunction targets the 18th Street gang and, as the press release puts it, "non-gang members" who sell drugs in Hollywood on behalf of the gang.

Those nongang members are virtually all illegal Mexicans, smuggled in by the gang. Cops and prosecutors say that they know the immigration status of these nongang "Hollywood dealers," as the city attorney calls them, but the gang injunction is silent on that aspect. If an officer were to arrest a dealer for his immigration status, or even notify immigration authorities, he would face discipline for violation of Special Order 40.

Likewise, although LAPD officers recognize previously deported gang members all the time, they can't touch a deported felon unless he has given them some other reason to stop him. Even then, an officer can arrest him only for the offense not related to immigration. Yet a deported gangbanger who reenters the country is already committing a federal felony � punishable by up to 20 years.

The city's ban on enforcing immigration crimes puts the community at risk by stripping the police of what may be their only immediate tool to remove a criminal from circulation. Trying to build a case for homicide, say, against an illegal alien gang member is often futile because witnesses fear retaliation. Enforcing an immigration crime would allow the cops to lock up the murderer right now, without putting a witness at risk.

The department's top brass brush off such concerns. No big deal if you see deported gangbangers back on the streets, they say. Just put them under surveillance for "real" crimes and arrest them for those. But surveillance is manpower-intensive. Where there is an immediate ground for arresting a violent felon, it is absurd to demand that the understaffed LAPD ignore it.

The stated reason for sanctuary policies is to encourage crime victims and witnesses who are illegal aliens to cooperate with the police without fear of deportation. This theory has never been tested. In any case, the official rationale could be honored by limiting police use of immigration laws to some subset of violators: say, deported felons whose immigration status police know.

The biggest myth about sanctuary laws is that they are immigrant-friendly. To the contrary: They leave law-abiding immigrants vulnerable to violence. Nor will it do to say that immigration enforcement is solely a federal responsibility. When it comes to fighting terrorism, the LAPD understands that it cannot rely on the feds alone to protect Los Angeles. Similarly, the department should not wait for a few of the 2,000-odd immigration agents, stretched to the breaking point nationwide, to show up and apprehend felons who are terrorizing neighborhoods.

The case against Bush's immigration plan -- Victor David Hanson, author of Mexifornia: A State of Becoming. Quotable:

Supporters of the proposed law say that something is needed since Americans simply refuse certain backbreaking jobs in construction, agriculture, hotels and restaurants. But such understandable pessimism rests on many questionable suppositions. It assumes, for instance, that the traditional remedies of the free market for scarce workers--mechanization and increased wages--ceased to work around 1980; that it is hard to sleep or dine out or find a cut lawn in an Iowa or Maine where there are not tens of thousands of illegal workers; that the experience of guest-workers in Germany and France provides encouraging analogies for importing cheap labor, that Californians or Texans once did not do most of their own work before the influx of industrious aliens; and that it is economically beneficial and morally sound to use foreign workers when millions of Americans remain unemployed.

We forget that there is a life cycle for the typical teenage worker from Oaxaca, whose backbreaking labor is said to be essential for the economy. For a laborer of 18, it may be a good bargain for all involved--but for too many people, after 30 years without education, English, and legality, too often these jobs turn out not to be entry-level or rite-of-passage, but remain dead-end, and thus catastrophe ensues when an aging, unskilled worker is injured, laid off, ill or the sole breadwinner of a large family. Only the public entitlement industry--health, housing, education and maintenance subsidies--can come to his rescue to provide some parity with Americans that his job or former job could not. His employer in the meantime looks for a younger, healthier, and foreign, successor. Thus the tragic cycle continues.

It is not only uneconomical in the long run to bus in impoverished laborers from Mexico, but also amoral to traffic in human capital. We praise the bracero program of the 1960s, but I remember it somewhat differently ...

UPDATE: A must read on THE BUSH PRESIDENCY from John Leo.

Heather MacDonald, City Journal:

President Bush's proposal to legalize the country's 10 or so million illegal aliens rests on a fallacy: that immigration enforcement has failed to stem the tide of illegal aliens. Therefore, the argument goes, amnesty is the only solution to the illegal-alien crisis. But immigration enforcement has not failed � it has never been tried. Amnesty, however, has been tried, and it was a clear failure that should not be repeated again.

For decades, the country's immigration enforcement has looked like this: a largish number of Border Patrol agents clustered at the border with Mexico, then a vast empty space beyond where illegal immigrants are home free � as if a football team had placed its entire defense on the line of scrimmage.

Roughly 2,000 immigration agents have been responsible for all interior enforcement, a massive portfolio which includes checking work sites, eradicating document fraud and alien smuggling, and apprehending criminal aliens. Their numbers are dwarfed by the millions of illegal aliens, the hundreds of thousands of employers who hire them, and the tens of thousands of counterfeiters and smugglers who facilitate their passage.

This dearth of enforcement resources has had the most dire consequences in the workplace. It is the lure of jobs that draws most aliens across the border illegally. The highest priority of immigration enforcement should be to disengage that jobs magnet by penalizing employers who hire illegals. The opposite is the case: A combination of inadequate manpower and weak laws has ensured that illegal aliens and their employers enjoy near immunity from detection and prosecution.

Currently, a mere 124 immigration agents are responsible for enforcing the law against hiring illegal aliens, according to the Associated Press. Only 53 employers were fined in 2002. An employer's chance of punishment for breaking the law, therefore, was a scant one one-hundreth of a percent.

But even were immigration authorities to get adequate resources, it would have little effect on the jobs magnet, because the government's tools for prosecuting illegal employment are so weak. Under public pressure to end the illegal-alien crisis, Congress in 1986 banned the employment of illegal aliens and imposed liability on employers who did so. It was a pyrrhic victory. The 1986 law (the Immigration Reform and Control Act [IRCA]) was emasculated at its inception and has been continuously thwarted in its application.

Here's how: A ban on illegal labor can work only if employers can reliably determine a worker's employment eligibility. Business and ethnic lobbies defeated worker verification in 1986 and every time it has been proposed since then.

What we have instead is a system of playacting. Millions of illegal workers pretend to present valid documents, and thousands of employers pretend to believe them. The employee merely needs to proffer, and the employer merely eyeball, any two documents from a dizzying list of 25 � all eminently counterfeitable � to establish the employer's compliance with the 1986 law. If the documents are not obvious fakes� scrawled on a matchbook with a red crayon, say � the employer must accept them.

In fact, if an employer looks too closely at a worker's papers, he may face a lawsuit for racial discrimination. Civil rights and ethnic lobbies made sure that IRCA included a whole new anti-bias bureaucracy: the Office of Special Counsel for Immigration-Related Unfair Employment Practices, which sues employers who demand clear proof of worker eligibility.

Having eyeballed the worker's papers, the employer is now virtually insulated from liability. He can be penalized only if the government can prove that he knowingly hired illegal aliens � an almost impossible burden as long as the worker has proffered some reasonable set of fake work papers.

It is this workplace sham that has guaranteed the onslaught of illegals into the country.

In trying to sell his amnesty program, Bush made a vague gesture towards correcting the sham: "Employers must not hire undocumented aliens," he said. "There must be strong workplace enforcement with tough penalties for . . . any employer violating these laws." This is meaningless verbiage. Unless Bush advocates a fraud-proof method of verifying a worker's eligibility � such as electronic checks of Social Security numbers � his new amnesty and guest-worker programs will have only one effect: The flood of illegal aliens will increase exponentially.

Illegal workers will still be able to proffer counterfeit documents to get hired, and even more will cross the border than before, lured by the reasonable expectation that in a few years, the U.S. will offer another amnesty.

The last large-scale amnesty in 1986 nearly sunk the INS. The barrage of applications for work papers, many fraudulent, overwhelmed the agency. Ethnic advocacy groups sued constantly to widen the eligibility criteria for citizenship, and under political pressure, the INS penalized agents with high denial rates. The results? Several Islamic terrorists got legal papers, and a new era of high-volume illegal immigration began.

Expect a worse outcome this time around. Immigrant advocacy groups are even more powerful, the numbers of illegals even higher than in 1986, and the Department of Homeland Security, now responsible for immigration enforcement, even more overwhelmed by its paperwork obligations.

Rather than granting President Bush his election year amnesty, Congress should give immigration authorities the resources and legal tools to protect the country's borders. It would be a novel experiment.

Tony Blankley on why the elite oppose the American people on illegal immigration.

Patterico's immigration argument is take up by Ben Shapiro. Quotable: "From 1992 to 2002, the number of companies fined for hiring illegals dropped from 1,063 to just 13."

Immigration and class warfare. If the American people are against massive illegal immigration why are politicians, academics and the media for it? Answer? This is class warfare folks, and the elite classes in America are after privileges and power they can't have without the moral power they gain from paternalistically "caring for" an ever growing poverty class -- and the material privileges they can enjoy from the dirt cheap labor immigrants can provide scrubbing the floors, cleaning the pools, raising the kids, building the second homes, clearing the tables and cleaning the toilets, etc. Who else is going to do this work for dirt cheap wages? These are jobs "America's Won't Do" at illegal alien wages -- and they are also blackmarket jobs which avoid all the the burdens of income or social security taxes, OSHA regulations, ADA regulations, and government regulatory paperwork of every sort imaginable, etc.

And make no mistake. It's class warfare against their working class fellow citizens, especially working mothers competing directly with illegals and laboring at very low wage part time jobs -- jobs made necesssary by extremely high tax rates on their husbands. And why are these taxes necessary? In part these high taxes are necessary to pay for the highly paid professionals manning the hospitals, the schools, and the government agencies which are providing an ever growing set of expensive services to ... low wage immigrants. America's largest -- constantly reloading -- and ever growing poverty class.

UPDATE: John Leo: "60 percent of Americans believe current immigration levels are a �critical threat to the vital interests of the United States,� while only 14 percent of government officials, business leaders, and journalists think so." Read more. Quotable:

in 1970, foreign-born workers earned as much as American-born workers, but by 1998 male immigrants typically earned only 77 percent of what natives earned, making the gap between immigrants and native stock three times as large as it was in 1910 .. Writing when Bush first proposed his Mexican initiative in 2001, sociologist Christopher Jencks said the highest price might be paid by children of the new Latino immigrants, who will very likely earn little more than their parents, perhaps become disillusioned with their new homeland, and harden into a sizable underclass. He raises the specter of a possible Latin-American-style gap in the United States between the rich and the poor ...

UPDATE: See the 2Blowhards for information on what immigration is doing to Southern California.

"If you're one of that 83 percent of Americans who want illegal immigrants deported, you're probably wondering why it's easier for those who break U.S. immigration law to get a job at the White House .. than for anybody who wants to enforce U.S. immigration law to get a job at the White House .. " Mark Steyn explains the madness. Quotable:

Remember the 1986 immigration amnesty? One of its beneficiaries was Mahmoud abu Halima, who went on to bomb the World Trade Center in 1993. His friend Mohammad Salameh wasn't so fortunate. He applied for the '86 amnesty but was rejected. So he just stayed on in America, living illegally, and happily was still around to help Mahmoud and co-attack the Twin Towers. He's the guy who rented the truck, which suggests he had enough ID to get past the rental agent at Ryder.

Pop Quiz. Complete the sentence fragment: "Job's Americans won't do .. "

Patterico: "Jobs Americans won't do at the wages offered given the presence of illegals willing to do it for less."

"Taking millions of currently undocumented immigrants and routing them into bureaucratic channels to make their status legal � as President Bush is proposing � could be like trying to divert a wild river into a leaky municipal aqueduct ... " A must read from The LA Times.

And don't miss Ramirez on a slightly different topic.

Patterico stakes out a provocative position on Bush's open borders plan:

The very second that we legalize one set of people, for humanitarian reasons, we will immediately require a new class of illegal people to take their place -- because in our increasingly socialistic economy, it is precisely the illegal status of illegal immigrants that makes them so attractive to the economy. Let me explain in more detail ...

He may even be right.

"President Bush's immigration reform proposal .. is a classic guest worker program on the European model ..."

The WSJ comes out solidly behind Bush's open borders plan, echoing the President's claim that there are "jobs that Americans don't want". Of course there are jobs that Americans don't want and there will be more and more jobs Americans won't want -- as foreign labor continues to drive down American wages. These are jobs Americans DID WANT at one time -- before their relative pay was beaten to the pavement by the tidal wave of cheap foreign labor. The "jobs Americans don't want" meme as an excuse for open border is nothing other than a self fulfilling prophecy -- and this self fulfilling prophecy will swallow up more and more of the American economy as relative low wage pressures overtake all of the non-degreed professions.

Citizen Smash comes out in favor of open borders with Mexico,and has links to dozens of blogosphere reactions to the Bush open borders plan.

UPDATE: SoCalLawBlog has a half-dozen good snippets from blogosphere reactions to the Bush immigration plan.

(Dallas) -- U.S. President George Bush today proposed to "fully enfranchise" illegal aliens working in the United States by allowing them to vote even though they're not citizens. Critics immediately denounced the move as a political ploy to lock up the Latino vote.

However, Mr. Bush said it's just the next logical step following his proposal yesterday to grant working rights to people who came into the country illegally .. An unnamed senior administration official said that voting rights are important for illegal aliens since they have to pay sales tax and "America was created to combat the idea of taxation without representation." More.

(Washington, D.C.) -- President George Bush's new proposal to grant working privileges to illegal aliens in the United States will stem the loss of U.S. jobs to cheap manufacturers in other countries. "This new policy brings 'offshore' home," said an unnamed senior administration official. "Offshore now means California, Texas and many other states where manufacturers will legally compete with wage levels in China, Mexico and elsewhere. Why send all that work away to be done by paupers, prisoners and slaves elsewhere when we have millions of undocumented workers who will gladly do it here?" more.

PunditFilter has a blogosphere roundup on Bush's open borders immigration policy.

A senior editor at Fortune on America's massively expensive immigration problem:

Illegal immigration increased hugely in the '90s. The illegal population is apparently around eight million, increasing by a half million a year. Perversely, a trumpeted toughening of border security may have made matters worse: Border patrols apprehend more people, but more people are trying to cross, so just as many get through as before�but now they stay longer because they know that if they leave the U.S., they might never get back in.

This is big trouble for a couple of reasons, the first being simple economics. Illegal immigrants don't pay taxes but do consume government services, especially medical care and education. By law, these services cannot be denied them. In fact, it's illegal for a hospital even to inquire about a patient's citizenship or immigration status.

In parts of the country with lots of illegal immigrants�the 24 U.S. counties that border Mexico, plus much of the rest of California�the situation is becoming debilitating. Senator Dianne Feinstein of California estimates medical costs for illegal immigrants are running about $1 billion a year in her state; with superb political instincts, she's blaming no one and simply backing a bill to reimburse state and local hospitals with federal money. I spoke recently with an administrator of a Texas hospital in a border county, and he says current rules imperil his hospital and drive him nuts. And by the way, he's not allowed to call immigrants illegal. They're undocumented.

The full economic effects are much wider. Employers who hire illegals pay them cash and thus evade employment taxes. They may also not report revenue from the work the illegals do and thus evade income taxes. Companies that compete with these employers must cut their own costs, mostly by paying their own workers (regardless of status) lower cash wages under the table, and the tax evasion spreads further.

A downward spiral begins. Government revenues decline while demand for government services goes up. The burden on taxpayers grows heavier. They respond by finding their own ways to avoid taxes or simply by leaving, making the problem even worse.

Until recently this was mostly a theoretical worry, but the recent rapid increase in illegal immigrants is making it real�and not just in border states. Latest census data show illegal immigrants increasing fast in Iowa, North Carolina, and Georgia.

I said this was big trouble for a couple of reasons. Economics was the first. The second is deeper. The situation we've created mocks American laws and ideals. It tells working, taxpaying citizens and other legal residents with Social Security numbers that they're chumps. Go to the emergency room, and if you can't pay your bill, the hospital can track you down and garnish your wages. But the illegal immigrant can't be tracked and doesn't pay the bill. You pay it, through your taxes. You dope.

Germany and France: they aren't allies -- Charles Krauthammer breaks the news to aging politicians still living in make-believe world of their 1950s childhood.

Mark Steyn on Slobo Milosevic, Gen. Clark and Saddam Hussein. Quotable:

Anyone who goes goo-goo at the mention of the words ''international tribunal'' -- i.e., Clark, John Kerry, Howard Dean and the rest of the multilatte multilateralist establishment -- should look at what it boils down to in practice. Even though the court forbade Milosevic and Seselj from actively campaigning in the Serbian election, they somehow managed to. In other words, ''international law'' is unable to enforce its judgments even in its own jailhouse .. This is the justice Clark wants for Saddam Hussein. If he gets his way, Saddam seems a shoo-in for the Iraqi presidential election circa 2009 ..

[But of course] letting dictators swank around the courtroom in a 10-year dinner-theater run of ''Perry Mason'' has nothing to do with justice

Citizen Smash remembers New Year's Day 2003 and The Longest Year. You won't want to miss this one.

The only dark cloud is a very dark one: another massive slaughter on American soil. The terrorists don�t have to be brilliant, just lucky � as they were last time, when they wandered around sticking out like sore thumbs to gazillions of Federal and state officials sensitivity-trained not to notice behaviour that practically screamed �I�m a terrorist!� Tom Ridge, Director of Homeland Security, says that right now al-Qaeda types are probing for weak spots at American airports. Which pre-supposes that they�re already in the country. Which confirms pretty much that the first weak spot remains the US border. On the whole, all the Federal agencies that failed so spectacularly on 9/11 are as bureaucratic, lethargic and inept as they were then. And no-one has been fired. One lucky break for a couple of Islamist boneheads, and the Dems and the media will be hammering Bush on why he let it happen all over again. It remains a melancholy fact that, for a US President, it�s easier to reform Iraq�s government agencies than America�s. I do not expect this situation to improve in 2004.

-- Mark Steyn

More Steyn. Quotable:

In California, Muslim community leaders have applauded the decision of the Catholic high school in San Juan Capistrano to change the name of its football team from the Crusaders to the less culturally insensitive Lions.

Meanwhile, 20 miles up the road in Irvine, the Muslim Football League�s New Year tournament will bring together some of the most exciting Muslim football teams in Orange County: the Intifada, the Mujahideen, the Saracens and the Sword of Allah.

That�s the spirit. I can�t wait for the California sporting calendar circa 2010: the San Diego Jihadi vs the Oakland Sensitives, the Malibu Hezbollah vs the Santa Monica Inoffensives, the Pasadena Sword of the Infidel Slayer vs the Bakersfield Self-Deprecators.

Like the unfortunate Mr Colin Rose, fired from his prison officer�s post at Blundeston jail for making an �inappropriate� remark about Osama bin Laden that could easily have distressed large numbers of his Muslim jailbirds, we must all try harder to avoid giving offence. Especially at this time of year, when the streets are full of exclusionary imagery �snowmen, reindeer, Yuletide logs, all evoking the time when the crusading white men of northern Europe rode their reindeer into the streets of Damascus hurling blazing Yule logs at Muslims.

So I have made a New Year�s resolution � or, if you can�t say that any more, an Eid resolution � to be extra-super-sensitive as we look at the state of play at the close of 2003. First of all, I�m amazed that we can still win anything, given the palpable urge of the Western world�s elites to abase themselves in the name of multiculturalism. Their position is basically that of Bernd Brandes, the computer engineer eaten by the German cannibal: go ahead, devour me, but chop my penis off first so I can watch you saut� it. But if the deal is that for every Islamic regime we overthrow we have to rename ten California sports teams, I think I can live with it. Yay, go, Sword of Allah!

And this:

The extreme Left has made a terrible strategic mistake shacking up with the Islamists. In one sense, they�re not as incompatible as they might appear: Islamism may be religious in origin but in its political form it is simply this decade�s brand of oppressive statism, as communism was before it. But the only question now is how deeply this strategic error infects the less insane Left. On National Public Radio the other day, Howard Dean advanced the theory that the Saudis had tipped off Bush about 9/11 in advance. When the Democratic presidential front-runner is cheerfully wearing his tinfoil hat in public, it�s no wonder the other fellows are scrambling to sound just as loopy ...

The electoral vote adjustments arising from the 2000 census mean that, even if Bush held only the same states as he did three years ago, he�d win by a much bigger margin. But it won�t stop there. Right now, the competitive states � the battleground � are the Democratic turf. Add to that the number of big-time Congressional Democrats who�ve decided to throw in the towel and you�re looking at a solid Bush victory with some key Republican gains in the Senate. The only question is how badly the Democrats do, and that depends on whether they allow themselves to be led toward the wilder Chomskyan shores or can content themselves with the artful straddle adopted by Hillary Clinton. But the notion that this is a president in trouble at home or abroad is ridiculous. 2004 will be a Republican year. That�s a better bet than the Sword of Allah in the California Muslim Football League.

"Yes, we are safer now that Hussein is in custody. But we could and should be a lot safer still ... "

Saddam vs. America Citizen Smash tells his personal story. Let's all raise a toast this holiday season to such men as Lt. Smash.

Hanson on Decter on Rumsfeld. Quotable:

As Decter points out, our current policy linking terrorism � which, after all, is merely a method, not an enemy per se � to real governments reflects Rumsfeld�s carefully acquired past understanding of how such killers work. As early as 1987, he was warning in public speeches that the United States could not stop terrorist attacks against its citizens "until it redefines the process as warfare by hostile governments rather than isolated acts." To anyone curious about who is the driving force behind the idea of taking the war to regimes that abet terrorism while at the same time hunting down the miscreants themselves, the answer is Rumsfeld.

Jean-Francois Revel on Europe's anti-American obsession.

Germany and France -- lenders of last resort for thugs and butchers.

"Anti-Americanism in the Islamic world and anti-Americanism in Europe are in fact linked, and both bear an uncanny resemblance to anti-Semitism ... "

P.J. O'Rourke is reporting on the war in the December issue of The Atlantic, which includes this brilliant bit of writing / reporting:

Aid seekers in England would queue automatically by needs, disabled war vets and nursing mothers first. Americans would bring lawn chairs and sleeping bags, camp out the night before, and sell their places to the highest bidders. Japanese would text-message one another, creating virtual formations, getting in line to get in line. Germans would await commands from a local official, such as the undersupervisor of the town clock. Even Italians know how to line up, albeit in an ebullient wedge. The happier parts of the world have capacities for self-organization so fundamental and obvious that they appear to be the pillars of civilization ... But here � on the road to Ur, in the Tigris-Euphrates Valley ... nothing was supporting the roof ...

There was no reason for people to clobber one another. Even assuming that each man in the riot � and each boy � was the head of a family, and assuming the family was huge, there was enough food in the truck. Mohammed al-Kandari, a doctor from the Kuwait Red Crescent Society, had explained this to the Iraqis when the trailer arrived.... Al-Kandari had persuaded the Iraqis to form ranks. They looked patient and grateful, the way we privately imagine the recipients of food donations looking when we're writing checks to charities. Then the trailer was opened, and everything went to hell ...

O'Rourke is interviewed here. Quotable:

The problems of the Middle East are the problems of mankind since we came out of the trees. They just happen to be a little more intense. When you look at a chaotic region like the Middle East, what you're really seeing is most of human history, and some parts of America and some parts of Europe and a few parts of Asia are glaring exceptions. The kind of peaceful, productive, incredibly wealthy life that we live in these few areas around the world�this has only been going on for a nanosecond as time goes. It's so exceptional I'm not even sure what it means. The whole world might degenerate back into the Middle East, because that's what it's always been. And you can't solve the problem of the Middle East, because it's not a problem, it's a condition. It's the normal condition of mankind.

If you read Donald Kagan's The Peloponnesian War, it's all there. It's been going on like this, time out of mind. Little islands of human happiness, peace, and prosperity are so exceptional at this point in history that I'm not even sure we can draw lessons from them.

(link via Instapundit)

OSAMA BIN LADEN and Saddam Hussein had an operational relationship from the early 1990s to 2003 that involved training in explosives and weapons of mass destruction, logistical support for terrorist attacks, al Qaeda training camps and safe haven in Iraq, and Iraqi financial support for al Qaeda--perhaps even for Mohamed Atta--according to a top secret U.S. government memorandum obtained by THE WEEKLY STANDARD ...

MORE.

Kenneth Timmerman, author of Preachers of Hate: Islam and the War on America, on what's gone wrong in the Arab world, including these important remarks on the homeland of the terror war against Americans:

The Saudis express surprise that they are under attack. And yet, just as Arafat has done in the Palestinian Authority, they are responsible for spawning a culture of race-hatred, bigotry and violence that is now reaching back to consume them. Saudi school books teach young Saudis that there is a �malicious Crusader-Jewish alliance striving to eliminate Islam from all the continents.� They teach their children that �the West in particular is the source of the past and present misfortunes of the Muslim world, beginning with the Crusades.� Saudi government-appointed clerics exhort young Saudis to murder Jews and Christians.

The Saudis appear to have woken up to the fact that their regime has become a target of terrorist attack. But there will always be more terrorists until the Saudis change the basic teachers of their schools and mosques, which continue to breed hate in new generations of children.

A nation apart -- "America is not exceptional because it is powerful; America is powerful because it is exceptional. And because what makes America different also keeps it rich and powerful, an administration that encourages American wealth and power will tend to encourage intrinsic exceptionalism."

IT'S WAR! Bush's steel tarrifs are ruled illegal -- costing America billions in sanctions and further damaging the world economy, and America's economy most of all. "First do no harm" would be a good rule of thumb for politicians as well as doctors.

Why do they hate us? part II. "Thirty percent of Germany's top ten political, biographical and historical book sales [at Amazon.de][are by] Michael Moore". This also helps explain why many Eurpeans are so -- how do you say -- unsophisticated. OK, I meant stupid, ignorant, ah, let's see ill-informed, factually challenged .. dumb. Did I leave anything out?

Oh, yah, lots of American's are on all fours with the German's on this one. So, so sad, but sadly true. Isn't there a web site somewhere called "Michael Moore is a Moron" or somesuch? Or was I thinking of that new documentary "Michael Moore Hates America".

American ideas -- about freedom and democracy, etc. -- provide an answer to the question "why do they hate us?". I'm talking about Old Europe of course. Quotable:

When the topic of the public opinion survey shifts to the spread of �American ideas and customs� � as opposed to attitudes toward the government or the people � the results become even more pointed: 27 percent of the French believe that the spread of American ideas and customs is good, but an overwhelming 72 percent consider it bad. Similarly, 24 percent of Germans think of American ideas as good, while 72 percent see this influence as bad. The attitudes of the British and Italians are, again, somewhat less severe than elsewhere in Europe: 56 percent of the British see the spread of American ideas as bad, as do 45 percent of Italians. When asked specifically about American ideas of democracy, 65 percent of the French, 55 percent of Germans, and 61 percent of Spaniards said they disliked them.

However, the cultural divide between the United States and Europe is not only evident in these measures of European attitudes toward the United States. There are equally pronounced indications of deeply different values and worldviews. Perhaps most telling, when asked to choose between the freedom to pursue one�s goals without state interference and, alternatively, the power of the state to guarantee that nobody is in need, 58 percent of Americans opted for freedom. The results in Europe are very different. In no European country was there majority support for individual freedom as opposed to the power of the state. In Great Britain, only 33 percent chose freedom, in France 36 percent, in Italy 24 percent, and in Germany 39 percent. Interestingly, the importance of individual freedom attracts greater approval in parts of the developing world than in Western Europe: Guatemala is at 61 percent, Ghana at 63 percent, Nigeria at 61 percent, India at 53 percent, and Pakistan at 61 percent�levels of support for freedom that put Europe to shame. On this issue so crucial to the relationship between state and economy, American individualist attitudes are closer to the rest of the world than is the European trust in the role of the state.

The anti-liberalism which haunts Old Europe hasn't been so obvious since the 1930s ...

Historian Paul Johnson on America's New Empire for Liberty. Quotable:

In 1800 it was Asia that produced the majority (57 percent) of world manufactured output, the West only 29 percent; by 1900 the West was producing 86 percent, Asia only 10 percent. Today, America�s production of world wealth, both absolutely and relatively, is accelerating. In the last quarter of the twentieth century, it added $5 trillion to its annual GDP. By 2050 the U.S. share of global output will constitute more than a quarter of the world total and will be as much as three times as big, for instance, as that of the European Union ..

This almost too stupid to be believed. The U.S. government is burning millions in cash to create make-work jobs in Iraqi government owned companies which, as a result, are operating completely outside the market system of profit and loss price signals. The boneheads in the U.S. government seem to be intentionally generating the classic knowledge problem of socialist calculation -- the worst disaster which can possibly befall any economy or enterprise. If you want real growth and real economic advance, the thing you need most are genuine prices and genuine profit and loss signals. Economic growth and coordination are impossible without these. Quotable:

The state-owned shoe factory here was once sophisticated enough to make shoes for Bally, the Swiss luxury goods company.

But that was 20 years ago, before wars and sanctions, before Saddam Hussein's army became the factory's biggest customer. Now, with Mr. Hussein and most of his army gone, production has plunged to 1,800 pairs of shoes a day from 5,000 at the start of the year, according to Riadh Hassan Ali, the company's design manager. There are scarcely any customers.

Six months after President Bush declared major military operations in Iraq over, the economy here is largely in stasis, propped up by American cash but showing little progress. The privatization of Iraq's decrepit state-owned industries like the shoe factory, is on hold ..

The shoe factory illustrates just how much ground the country must make up. The state-owned company that runs the factory employs 3,000 people around Iraq to make shoes, as well as a few other leather goods.

Plant No. 7, where the company makes men's dress shoes, is clean and cheery. Under high ceilings, men stamp out pieces from shiny leather hides, while women stitch together shoe tops at sewing machines. With the scattering of the army and the police, a search for new clients has begun.

With the collapse of Mr. Hussein's rule, Iraq no longer subsidizes imports of leather hides, a subsidy that the company passed along to its customers. "Because we bought it very cheap from the government, we sell it very cheap to the citizens," said Mr. Ali, the design manager. "The profit was controlled."

Now, however, the company must buy its hides on the open market, and pass those increased costs along to customers. So prices have risen, and sales have dropped, Mr. Ali said.

But the company has not had to fire anyone, because the United States does not want to put more unemployed Iraqis on the streets and risk worsening the security crisis. So the occupying authorities are paying the salaries of all 3,000 workers, even if they have nothing to do.

In this, the shoe company is no different from any of Iraq's 53 state-owned companies, whose workers are all still being paid by the occupation, at a cost of several million dollars each month. The cost is small compared with the others the occupation is incurring, but the payments show that for now, security considerations have topped the United States' hope of making the state-owned companies more efficient.

With wages subsidized but the shoe company forbidden to fire anyone, estimating profit or loss is impossible, much less planning long-term investments in new equipment, said Ali Hadi, a manager. "We can't calculate these things now," he said. "When next year comes, we will calculate next year."

(via Mises Econ Blog)

Enough said.

Internationally isolated, fighting economic decline .. yes, we're talking about France. Quotable:

Nicolas Baverez, a historian and economist, has led this fall's doom-and-gloom pack of books and essays. His manifesto: a 135-page bestseller titled "France Is Falling." His thesis: The country's economy, politics and society have sunk into paralysis because leaders have consistently and self-destructively resisted change and refused to accept the realities of a modernizing, globalizing world.

Baverez blames an antiquated, statist mentality for unemployment mired at near 10%, economic growth near zero, crippling strikes, the deaths of almost 15,000 people during an August heat wave that overwhelmed a health system on vacation, and other maladies both tangible and existential.

In contrast to the United States, Baverez writes, French leaders believe "the more things change, the more must be done to change nothing.... This political, economic and social immobility, which is also intellectual and moral, has plunged France into decline.

"The autism of a political class moored to the models of the 1960s and 1970s has ... [degraded] the nation." ..

Although Baverez is no fan of U.S. foreign policy, he dismisses Chirac's approach as a futile attempt to make France a kind of high-minded referee of international affairs. Throwing around "words of power without means of power," he said, masks France's fading role in a divided Europe and in a world shaped by the military and economic might of the United States.

"France finds itself in complete isolation in the world and in Europe," Baverez writes.

Terrorists have a sizable advantage. A terrorist can attack at any time, in any place, using virtually any technique. And it is not possible to defend every potential target at all times in every place against every form of attack. That being the case, the way to defeat terrorists is to take the war to them -- to go after them where they live and plan and hide, and to make clear to states that sponsor and harbor them that such actions will have consequences.

-- America's War Defense Secretary explains America's defense war strategy, today in the Washington Post.

A remarkable interview with war correspondent Bob Arnot from Iraq:

ARNOT: I think the most interesting point about this bombing, Joe, is that people talk about terrorism. There�s nothing terrifying about it. Some guy blew up a bomb. Nobody was scared. Nobody was even particularly anxious. It is just something that happens every day. The thing that makes it a terrorist event is that you have then 100 cameras that come over and cover it. And that is the frustration, is that it is a very low-level, nickel-dime terrorist war here. There is no civil war. There is no mass insurrection. And it really obscures the truth, which is, there is very steady, day-to-day progress, in terms of getting electricity, water, opening schools, the clinics, more hospitals than Saddam ever had open ...
SCARBOROUGH: Have you heard any suggestions that you may have been the target of this bombing?
ARNOT: Well, the best suggestion was, the bomb was right underneath my window. At this point, honestly, we don�t know whether we were being attacked as NBC or it was local revenge killing of some kind of another or whether just because there are a lot of Western cars out front there.
But the important thing is, if you have been through a lot of wars-and I have been through over 20 of them, lot of history-every war has a lot of chaos after it. Look at Germany after World War II. Look at Kosovo. You expect a lot of chaos. And I think the perspective is, you cannot get caught up in that. France for a year after 1945 was a mess. Germany, the Marshall Plan did not even start for three years afterwards.
This thing, to put it in perspective, has gone like grease lightning compared to all those other wars. You have a plan in four months, instead of four years, like the Marshall Plan. You got the schools open. You have a provisional government in here. They are going to write a constitution in the next six months. We are not telling a Pollyannaish story.
Sure, there were missteps. There were not enough police in here. The plan maybe didn�t account for the kind of chaos. They expected the government to just sort of lop off the top and have people here standing ready to sort of start right back up again. But to their credit, the U.S. Marines said all the way up on the road with them, expect chaos. They expected this thing, like all totalitarian regimes, just basically crumbles into nothing.
And you sort of just are standing there with nothing to work with. But I will tell you, Joe, I have been extremely impressed with Ambassador Bremer. I spent an evening with him, went on the road with him down to Basra. Behind the scenes, he is not like he is on TV. He�s like a kid. He�s fun. He�s energetic. He�s witty. I challenged him on-not challenged-but I talked to him about this Belgian-style federal government. He immediately said, oh, no, that is not going to work. The Flemings take one spot and the Walloons the other. He really knows his stuff. And I talked to his whole staff, took them aside. And every stack of paper, he knows what�s in it. He�s on top of it. And they are bewildered at the CPA, bewildered, that they have all this progress, all these schools opening, all these clinics, and all they see on TV is something that�s made to look like Vietnam. In fact, I call it the Vietnamization of Iraq.
SCARBOROUGH: Now, the latest CNN/Gallup poll reports that 67 percent of Iraqis say Iraq will be better off in five years than it is now. And it is currently better off than it was before the U.S. invasion.
I asked Bob Arnot to explain why no one in America seems to hear about these numbers.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
ARNOT: I think there are two reasons for it.
The CPA was saying the other night-one is that you have news organizations here that you can cover sort of one story. And it is interesting, Joe. To be honest, with us, today, our satellite truck is gone. We just have this videophone up. I�m doing the news of the day. And what am I doing? Bombing in Mosul and an RPG attack someplace else.
You�re sort of stuck. If you just do that one story today, that�s all can you do, and you kind of can�t ignore it. The strength that NBC has had on this story is having that extra team to be able to come in to sort of look around. My background as a physician is humanitarian. I�m on the board of Save the Children and a bunch of other great organizations, tremendously motivational organizations, and really trying to understand the reconstruction after a war, after civil war.
And it is very, very difficult. It is very, very complex. I met with
this U.S. Army colonel whose name is Russell Gould (ph). What an
inspirational guy. He is fighting the fight of his life. He�s fighting the guerrillas out there. He has not lost a man, thank God, in about siX weeks, because he�s getting those IEDs before they explode. He is making -� he has got a great, great network out there, tremendous intelligence network. But he also had his first district council meeting. He, the other night, sat out there with me in front of the district council. He says: You know what? I am teaching democracy. They have the freedom to speak. And they�re doing that right now. They have the freedom to assemble. He has seen them assemble. And you know what? They have the freedom to make decisions. And they�re marking hard decisions right now.
So, I�ll tell you. The commanders out here. I was with General Hemlick (ph) the other day, one of General Major Petraeus lead men there, 101st Airborne. Again, tears in your eyes sort of motivation when you see the danger they face, and that they took this town called Afghani (ph). And they have that town up, school, clinic, hospital, soccer field, police force, all up and going. And the kids were actually cheering in the street.
I was with Bremer the other day down with the Marsh Arabs. Again, you know, hi. I asked the kids, George Bush or Saddam Hussein, who do you love? They say, George Bush. So there�s a lot of enthusiasm. You have the Baathist here. There is no question, they have very deep pockets. They have tens of millions of dollars. They brought in this Ansar al-Islam sect. They brought the Wahabis in.
They are supposed to be a very, very tight, tight al Qaeda connection. They basically hire local thugs to do the dirty work. And it is. It is a big fight between good and evil. We are good. And I hope we win.
SCARBOROUGH: Yes.
Hey, I want to ask you about American soldiers, because, when I was in Congress, I represented a district that had five military bases. I still have a lot of friends that are serving the military, a lot of family members. They call me up. They e-mail me. They write me and they talk about being distressed, that their husbands, that their daughters, their sons are overseas doing a great job in Iraq.
And yet you don�t hear that good news, unless you see Bob Arnot reports and maybe one or two other reports sporadically. Tell me how our men and women in uniform are responding to the steady stream of bad news that�s coming out there. And do you get a sense that maybe the worm is starting to turn, so to speak, and maybe some other news organizations may be adding a proper perspective to tell the rest of this story in Iraq, the good news that�s happening out of Baghdad and the rest of Iraq?
ARNOT: Yes. I was on the weekend in a place called Sulaymaniyah. It is so safe they actually have U.S. armed forces up there, an R&R location, where the locals provide all of the security. Down south, again, outside of Basra, I talked to the honorable Hillary Senate (ph), who�s running that district down there. They have not had any car bombs. They have not had any shootings; 85 percent of the country is in reasonably good shape.
Now, you asked about U.S. armed services members out here. If you�re in a transportation pool and you�re going up and down the roads and you�re getting attacked day in, day out. It�s a little tough motivationally. but got to tell you, the individual commanders I have talked to from the 1st I.D., the 101st, out here, in fact the 1st Armored Division, just bring tears to your eyes. It pumps you up just to be around them.
And I�m not being jingoistic. I just mean, in terms of motivational bosses, they are absolutely phenomenal. And it goes all the way down the chains. I was out with these guys the other day-soldiers, I should say. They actually been attacked. Five of them had won Purple Hearts. They were all offered a trip home. And they all refused to take it, saying that they wanted to stay on the streets of Baghdad.
So, the commanders out there are just as spectacular as they were during the war. They have much more meddlesome, much more troublesome problems than they did during the war. But they�re doing a great job. And I�m not being a cheerleader. I just got to tell you, you go out there and you feel absolutely great.
Part of it is, I think, that it is sort of hard to get at those-quote-�good news stories,� because it is hard to get up into those different areas and set up and still cover the news down here in Baghdad. But the big bottom line, Joe, is just perspective. Any war has chaos afterwards. Any war is not as properly planned for as it might otherwise be. But you have to look at the march of progress.
SCARBOROUGH: One final question, because we had a congressman on a few nights ago that actually made-a Democratic congressman that went over to Iraq. He came back. And he actually said that he believed the media was hurting our chances of succeeding in Iraq.
I want to ask, do you get a sense that other media people, other reporters on the ground there, are starting to understand that they may not be giving the full picture to the American people? Do you get a sense that maybe �The New York Times,� who has run a few positive stories of late, CBS News, where you had Dan Rather a couple nights ago saying a lot of these negative stories do not create a proper perspective, do you get a sense they�re starting to understand that maybe they need to tell the rest of the story?
ARNOT: Sure.
I don�t want to be too critical of the press, because, when you�re out here, like we were yesterday, you have a bomb blow off out your window, it is a pretty dramatic and it�s a pretty interesting story. And day to day, that does sort of captivate your attention and it does sort of distract you from seeing the other story.
And, honestly, if you cover wars, you are not probably used to gas turbine generators and what kind of chlorine you use to clean up water and how many clinics are open. But I think, Joe, it is one of the most interesting stories ever, because imagine if it were the other way. Imagine if there were no terrorism and everything perfectly and they were turning the power on. It would be no story at all.
But given this tremendous sort of disparity, given the terrorism, the daily attack on U.S. soldiers out here and Marines, and the fact that they basically can go out there, against all this adversity, and do it make it one of the most interesting stories ever, just showing again how Americans, faced with this incredible adversity, are doing a remarkable job and inspiring the rest of us while they do it.
And I think that is the real story. I walk up to a commander and I say, I am not here to make up a story. I am not here with any agenda. I am telling your story the most honest way I possibly can. I just want to see what you�re doing. They�re very, very open. And when they let down their guard, what you see is great leadership and a great job.

Calblog reports on a new lawsuit in the making.

And the Democratic Party flack of the year award goes to ...

Dollars, not Dinars for Iraq. (via Mises Econ Blog)

A call for Britain to retain its position as an independent world power, and not lose it's liberal identity within an uncompetitive European bureaucratic state. Money quote:

For 300 years, the principal British interests have been the maintenance of free trade and the rule of law. They remain our interests. They are best upheld by the Anglo-American alliance (although we must be careful not to be subsumed by it). The decrepit forces of the EU, by contrast, just aren't up to the job.

So safeguarding our interests in the future could necessitate another redesign of the British state. As Iain Duncan Smith touched on in his Prague Declaration last week, this would mean shunning the European constitution and instead arguing for a free trade association of sovereign nations, including Russia, Turkey and the Balkans.

Leftist cowboys of the world unite! Blair, Schr�der, Chr�tien and other Left leaders back a policy of armed invasion in a policy seemingly contrary to the idiotic articles of the U.N Charter:

Tony Blair is expected to put his name today to a declaration justifying armed intervention against failing states. He and other Left-wing national leaders will expound the principle, which runs counter to traditional thinking about national sovereignty, at the end of a four-day conference on the subject of "progressive governance".

I'm sure there is some clause in there somewhere that says this is only ok for countries led by proper Leftist governments, and is to be strickly forbidden for the United States, at least during those periods when America is led by a Republican President -- or some such phraseology. ScrabbleFace, the story is all yours ..

The unelected rulers of Hong Kong say no to democracy now demands -- and the old four year timetable for democracy will remain in place.

Hong Kong in crisis -- detailed coverage from The Straight Times.

The only conclusion one can draw is that for liberal Democrats, America's strategic interests are not just an irrelevance, but a deterrent to intervention. This is a perversity born of moral vanity. For liberals, foreign policy is social work. National interest--i.e., national selfishness--is a taint. The only justified interventions, therefore, are those which are morally pristine, namely, those which are uncorrupted by any suggestion of national interest.

Hence the central axiom of left-liberal foreign policy: The use of American force is always wrong, unless deployed in a region of no strategic significance to the United States.

-- Charles Krauthammer

Dick Morris fisks the French.

InstaPundit< is all over the Iranian freedom protest story -- and that's not all. He's also hot on the Hong Kong freedom protest story. Glenn's solution? Hong Kong should petition for decolonization and independence. Certainly Hong Kong is much more prepared for it than where the LSE socialist in Africa during the 1960s.

The Stalinist crimes of Walter Duranty and the NY Times. Worth quoting:

"The Times constantly over the years makes unadulterated heroes of the victims of the blacklist. In their obituaries they always present communists in a positive light. The Times seems to have lost any critical faculty when writing about the issue of communism. They would never publish glowing obituaries for dead Nazis and fascists as they do for dead communists."

-- Ronald Radosh

The CEO of Nokia on Old Europe -- without free, competitive labor markets it just can't compete.

Anti-Subversion measure "postponed" in China's Hong Kong, after week of demonstrations.

The French pension reform bill has passed. Worth noting:

Besides extending working years, the measure would remove a barrier between the public sector, which enjoys special privileges, and the private sector - a taboo in the past. Public sector workers currently have to work 37.5 years to qualify for full benefits. Under the bill, they would have to work 40 years, as in the private sector, by 2008.

InstaPundit.Com asks:

How many links between Al Qaeda and the government of Saudi Arabia are needed to justify regime change there?

Do Bush and Powell have an answer for that one?

"I start talking about exchange programs and they say, `Great.' And when I say they're all from France, end of conversation."

-- Mary Lou Church, student exchange family recruiter for Loisirs Culturels � L'�tranger. Perhaps it's time for the French to ask themselves, "Why do they hate us?".

Congo will attempt a coalition government in a bid to end the fighting. This comes on news that India will be sending a force to assist the French, who have yet to fully succeed in their effort to bring security to the people of Bunia. Pakistani replacements are due in September.

Trouble abrewing? Send in the French!

"Return rule to the people" -- chant of hundreds of thousands marching in the Chinese province of Hong Kong.

Meanwhile, the Chinese Communist Party celebrates it's 82 birthday, with party chief Hu Jintao saying,"Power should be used for the people. Concern should be shown for the people and benefits sought for the people." Contrast that with what the people of Hong Kong are chanting in the streets.

I imagine Hu's statement reflects the private sentiments of many members of the powerful committee in control of the laws of the United States. If the people of America had not lost the true spirit of democracy and liberty which was their inheritance, perhaps we'd have hundreds of thousands outside the Supreme Court chanting, ""Return rule to the people".

The average person in sub-Saharan Africa earns less than $1 a day. The average cow in Europe -- thanks to government subsidies -- earns about $2 a day ...

more.

Hans Blix calls it quits.

Blair's communications director continues his attack against the BBC over Iraq intelligence charges.

What would Instapundit say? French troops invoke gun ban in Congo town.

Reform comes to the European farm subsidy system. I'm both surprised and pleased.

Check out Drezner for more on how France stands in the way of a more liberal world farm economy -- and what this means for both France and the very poor of the world.

Get out of town "or else" -- French general to Congo tribal forces. It wasn't immediately clear which American movie hero the French general was attempting to imitate .. nor was it clear whether the Congo troops would comply fully with the demand.

It's mission creep for the hapless U.N. forces in Congo. They've now been authorized to use deadly force -- but will they? And is there light at the end of this tunnel?

The U.N. loses two more in Congo.

This is rich. Belgium's Foreign Minister is war criminal, charges a suit filed under Belgium's international war crimes statutes -- the same laws which were used against Pres. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, Colin L. Powell and Tony Blair, among others. Think the Belgiumians have ever heard of the expression "get a grip"?

Why do they hate us? Germans award Susan Sontag a "Peace Prize". Which raises the question, what do the Germans know about peace?

U.S. bureaucrats block business efforts in Iraq. Iraqi-American businessman Rubar Sandi boasts:

In 10 days, I managed to do more than ORHA has done in two months.

Noah Feldman goes to Baghdad. Assignment -- close the "freedom gap". Quotable:

There are hopeful signs of a desire for freedom in the Middle East. Arab intellectuals have called on Arab governments to address the "freedom gap" so their peoples can fully share in the progress of our times. Leaders in the region speak of a new Arab charter that champions internal reform, greater politics participation, economic openness, and free trade.

James Pinkerton is blogging from Iraq. (via Agonist)

Andrew Sullivan on the emerging European super state.

The battle over Blair's constitution changes is going to get nasty in the House of Lords. William Rees-Mogg asks, does Blair have the brains for it? Short answer, no. Quotable:

A reform on which the nation�s whole legal system depends has been settled by a tired man, not a genius, in the midst of other pressing business. Not surprisingly it has been botched. No one who was the Prime Minister would have employed the Prime Minister to do this work.

That is bad enough. Yet the situation is worse than that. These proposals are strategic: they will govern British jurisprudence for years to come. Indeed, they will leave an indelible mark even if they have to be reversed. Yet they have been adopted for tactical, not strategic, reasons. The decision to opt for a supreme court seems only to be a few days old.

The Prime Minister had to complete his reshuffle. There was a crisis over the euro. There was another crisis over Iraq and the missing weapons of mass destruction. Alan Milburn had unexpectedly decided to resign. At some stage there had been a plan for a Ministry of Justice amalgamating some of the powers of the Home Office with those of the Lord Chancellor.

David Blunkett would not have that; he thumped the table. Derry Irvine would not have his office abolished; he thumped the table. Tony Blair had more to fear from losing David Blunkett, so he backed the Home Office. The resulting package left the Home Office with all its powers but abolished the Lord Chancellor. This was not the careful constitutional consideration which might have resolved so fundamental an issue. It was a short-term defensive deal, done under pressure at the last minute; from conception to birth seems only to have been a matter of a few days.

Matt Welch looks at France, and decides the glass is half full. But what I want to know is -- what does typical New Yorker Greg Packer think?

Krauthammer always says it best:

Everyone thought Saddam had weapons because we knew for sure he had them five years ago and there was no evidence that he disposed of them. The WMD- hyping charge is nothing more than the Iraqi museum story Part II: A way for opponents of the war--deeply embarrassed by the mass graves, torture chambers and grotesque palaces discovered after the war--to change the subject and relieve themselves of the shame of having opposed the liberation of 25 million people.

France in descent:

A shameless anti-American France is understandable in the context of a once great country now crippled by deficits, debts and unemployment. With low growth rates France is in rapid decline. From 1990 to 2000, among the EU countries, the French standard of living dropped from third-place to 12th. In 1980, an Irish citizen had 40 percent of the purchasing power of a Frenchman. That figure is now 125 percent.

Incapable of making any policy other than raising taxes, increasing public spending, enacting more social laws, creating more welfare and fostering more irresponsibility, current politicians and elites are to blame for the French decline, and they know it. Just like failed politicians in the Third World, French politicians know they must divert attention onto scapegoats.

Pop quiz -- what the big difference between Ireland and France?

Even the NY Times can't help but belittle the U.N. "peace keeping forces" in Congo. There is no way The Onion can compete with this kind of stuff. These U.N. forces give new meaning to the word "pathetic".

The NY Times has a page devoted to its full "rally behind the welfare check" coverage of the political battle aiming to give the "child tax credit" to those who pay no taxes. What you get is flood the zone coverage and social activism -- all on one page. Remember when newspapers did their part to help the poor by running donation drives?

Is France finished? -- as a Western country, that is? A juicy quote I can't pass up:

The more I study the history of France in the 20th century, the more I come to the conclusion that the psyche of the French people might justifiably warrant an entire psychiatric conference. Throughout the entire 20th century, the French seemed to spend most of their time desperately craving being crushed by some kind of foreign totalitarian power. Their dreams, obviously, were shattered by the Americans, who rescued them from the Nazis and subsequently protected them from the Soviets. But now the French have cleverly figured it all out: to be taken over by Islam from within.

And a bit more seriously, this thought from Jean-Fran�ois Revel:

France is the prey of an anti-American obsession. For the French, Americans are the enemy they have to hate in every circumstance. They have to hate Americans because Americans are successful, because Americans are powerful, because the French prefer resentment to achievement. They are so obsessed by their hatred of the United States they do not see anymore the real dangers confronting France. It�s a very dangerous situation. I do not know how we could go out of this situation. I honestly don�t know if it is even still possible.

Rather depressing news continues to come out of France. Instapundit, of course, is all over the story of corrupt and strike-ridden France, with continued updates from bloggers and correspondents on the ground in Paris and elsewhere. One wants to think that things can't be nearly so bad as analysts have it -- they usually never are-- but as things stand, the long term situation in France does look rocky, at the very least.

What should we expect as youthful France becomes increasingly Muslim?

Victor Davis Hanson on the lessons of war.

The central villain in the poverty causing farm policy of Europe is -- surprise -- France. French farm policy arguable leaves more innocents dead each week than the total number of non-combatants killed in all of American wars over the last two decades. Socialism in one country leads to poverty in a hundred countries. (via Daniel Drezner)

The markets -- and the people of Iraq -- are beginning to work. So who are the foreign imperialists out to kill the baby of Iraqi recovery in the crib? Our man Mark Steyn reports:

So what precisely is happening .. that requires an Oxfam/ICRC summit? Well, the problem, as they see it, is that, sure, there's plenty of food available but "the prices are too high". That's why the World Food Programme and the other NGOs need to be brought in, to distribute more rations to more people. Can you think of anything Iraq needs less? If prices really are "too high", it's because storekeepers are in the first flush of a liberated economy. Given that the main drag in Rutbah has a gazillion corner shops lined up side by side, competition will soon bring prices down to what the market can bear, if it hasn't already. Offering folks WFP rations will only put some of those storekeepers out of business and ensure that even more people need rations. But perhaps that's the idea. And perhaps that's why I found rather more hostility towards the WFP, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees et al than towards the military. "Americans only in the sky," one man told me, grinning as a chopper rumbled overhead. "No problem." Down on the ground, meanwhile, the new imperial class are the NGOs. They shuttle across the globe, mingling with their own kind - other SUV users - and bringing with them the values of the mother country, or the momother bureaucracy. Like many imperialists, they're well-meaning: they see their charges as helpless and dependent, which happy condition has the benefit of justifying an ever-growing aid bureaucracy in perpetuity. It will be very destructive for Iraq if the tentativeness of the American administration in Baghdad allows the ambulance-chasers of the NGOs to sink their fangs into the country.

Nuclear blackmail of America worked for N. Korea. Now Iran wants its tribute from America.

The Wolfowitz interview is worth reading. A tasty nugget:

Q: .. is there anything at all, we talked about this a little off the record, is there anything at all to the Straussian Connection?

Wolfowitz: It's a product of fevered minds who seem incapable of understanding that September 11th changed a lot of things and changed the way we need to approach the world. Since they refused to confront that, they looked for some kind of conspiracy theory to explain it.

I mean I took two terrific courses from Leo Strauss as a graduate student. One was on Montesquieu's spirit of the laws, which did help me understand our Constitution better. And one was on Plato's laws. The idea that this has anything to do with U.S. foreign policy is just laughable.

Q: There is something kind of humorous in it because a few weeks ago all we heard was he's been the kind of cowboy, rampaging around the globe looking for evildoers. And now he seems to be in the vehicle of erudite philosophy ..

Wolfowitz: It sort of calls to mind the joke about the President and the Pope are on a boat, and the Pope's hat blows off. The President says, no, I'll get it for you and walks across the top of the waves, picks up the hat and walks back across the top of the waves, hands the hat to the Pope and the next day the headlines are, "President Bush can't swim." [Laughter]