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ets for Freedom, chaired by former Marine and former Gov. Pete Wilson, is launching a $2.2 million ad blitz in Obama-crazed California, calling the liberal, anti-war Senator out on the surge:

The ad takes three good swipes at BHO – his vote against troop funding, his near-complete failure to visit the war zone, his subcommittee’s lack of hearings – and concludes by urging members of Congress to pass the Lieberman/Graham Senate resolution 636, which recognizes the surge’s success. 636 warns against any action “that jeopardizes those gains or dishonors the service and sacrifice of the men and women of the United States Armed Forces who made those gains possible.”

In a SacBee interview, Wilson said:

Wilson said the media effort is well worth the money in blue state California, where “we’ve got this huge congressional delegation and half of them are opposed to the surge.”

Pointing out that California has the nation’s largest population of military veterans, Wilson said: “They need to hear from constitutents, particularly veterans who have been in combat, that the turnaround in Iraq has been nothing short of remarkable.”

Wisely, Vets for Freedom is not wasting any money buying air time in San Francisco. One of the important lessons you learn early in public affairs is to understand where you can have influence, and where you can’t.

For more on Vets for Freedom, including info on how to volunteer and contribute, click here.

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he U.S. holds 19,000 detainees in Iraq, down from 26,000 less than a year ago – and we won’t be able to hold onto them much longer.

Should they be transferred to the Iraqis as part of the inevitable untangling of our involvement in Iraq?  Or is there a different, possibly better, alternative?

Gen. David Petraeus thinks so, reports the WSJ today.

The U.S. focus in Iraq is fast shifting from fighting a war to preparing for its aftermath. The cornerstone of the transition is an effort to rehabilitate and release thousands of Iraqi detainees, including many former insurgents. …

Few in the military question the need for the rehabilitation effort, but some wonder whether troops should be leading it. Some officers privately complain the program is turning them into social workers who coddle violent extremists. But few are willing to voice those criticisms because the effort is a favored project of Gen. David Petraeus, the former commander of U.S. forces in Iraq. Gen. Petraeus believes the country’s stability will be shaped by how well former insurgents are integrated back into Iraqi society. He sees the rehabilitation push as a powerful weapon in that fight.

Under the program, detainees are taught literacy, mathematics and moderate Islamic thought.  The US military teaching moderate Islamic thought, and hoping these guys won’t once again fall under the spell of some fire-snorting imam at the corner mosque?

“I’m hopeful that what the detainees learned in the program will moderate their religious extremism,” said Maj. Gen. Mark Hertling, who commands U.S. forces in northern Iraq. “Will some go back to their old habits? Probably.”

Probably?  Definitely.  And some of those who go back to their old habits of murder and terror may return to kill our soldiers.  But which ones of the 19,000 will they be? There’s no way of knowing, so minimization is not a bad strategy.  Each detainee who leaves detention and uses his new skills to get a job is likely to leave violence behind, and that’s one less terrorist we and Iraq will have to deal with.

The problem with the program really is that the military has to enforce it.  Troops shouldn’t be teaching language skills and math. As WSJ put it:

Few in the military question the need for the rehabilitation effort, but some wonder whether troops should be leading it. Some officers privately complain the program is turning them into social workers who coddle violent extremists.

Thomas Barnett of The Pentagon’s New Map fame agrees, envisioning a future in which we field two armies:  One a swift, strong fighting force capable of regime change anytime, anywhere, and the second an army of engineers, teachers and social workers tasked with nation building.  He realizes that fighting men are not suited to the latter task, and it takes the military’s eye off its mission, and that Iraq has taught us that nation-building is a much more difficult task than regime changing.

Imagine if we had had these two armies in place in 2003.  The entire war could very well have turned out differently, and we wouldn’t be looking at 19,000 detainees today, just beginning to worry about what to do with them.

Photos: NY Times (top), DayLife.com (bottom)

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“He’s played a historic role, there’s just no two ways about it. Gen. Petraeus is clearly the hero of the hour.” – Defense Secretary Robert Gates

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avid Petraeus’ 20-month tour of duty in Iraq is over, and his four-star comrade in re-casting the war, Ray Odierno, is stepping in. Odierno will still report to Petraeus, who moves on to the more hospitable climes of Tampa and U.S. Central Command.

Petraeus is a twice-in-a-century kind of soldier. Korea and Vietnam didn’t produce one; we have to go all the way back to Eisenhower and McArthur in WWII to find a military hero who played a transformational role in a major war while serving as an example of valor and virtue to the people of the nation.

The enemy marked his departure by sending a bomb-laden woman into a group of police officers, killing 22. So let’s take his admonition seriously and not pull out a couple brigades quite yet.

Here’s AP’s report, if you’d like to read more.

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he Washington Post editorial page is not where you’d expect to see an essay that condemns the Dem prez nominee as hopelessly confused and wrong-footed, but there it is, Mr. Obama in Iraq.

The editorial stands out on a day that finds much of the media trying valiantly, but not too effectively, to cover their O-swoon – see Mo Doud’s Cocky or Commander-in-Chiefly? in today’s NYT for an example – or are focused on McCain’s criticism of Obama on the surge (that “he’d rather lose a war in order to win a political campaign”), like this from Joe Klein:

I can’t remember a more scurrilous statement by a major party candidate. It smacks of desperation. It renews questions about whether McCain has the right temperament for the presidency. How sad.

What do you say we measure Klein’s criticism of McCain against WaPo’s criticism of Obama? The editorial winds up for several paragraphs before delivering this closer:

Yet Mr. Obama’s account of his strategic vision remains eccentric. He insists that Afghanistan is “the central front” for the United States, along with the border areas of Pakistan. But there are no known al-Qaeda bases in Afghanistan, and any additional U.S. forces sent there would not be able to operate in the Pakistani territories where Osama bin Laden is headquartered. While the United States has an interest in preventing the resurgence of the Afghan Taliban, the country’s strategic importance pales beside that of Iraq, which lies at the geopolitical center of the Middle East and contains some of the world’s largest oil reserves. If Mr. Obama’s antiwar stance has blinded him to those realities, that could prove far more debilitating to him as president than any particular timetable.

Other than choosing the word “eccentric” when so many other words would have worked better (thick-headed, flabbergasting, laughable, cro-zo), that pretty much nails it. You have in Obama a candidate who is clueless regarding the threats we face and the best means to face them, who wants so much to not be Bush that he refuses to acknowledge reality.

I for one would rather have a president who makes the mistake of calling out a fool all by himself instead of assigning the task to a surrogate, than one who tramples over Pakistan – a nuclear-armed nation that’s just barely holding off an Islamist uprising – to hunt for Osama bin Laden, who latelyhas done nothing more threatening than issuing tapes that are, to borrow a word from above, cro-zo.

Photo: AP

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es, of course the quote of the day is this, from Barack Obama, answering ABC’s Terry Moran:

“Here is what I will say. I think that, I did not anticipate, and I think that this is a fair characterization, the convergence of not only the surge but the Sunni awakening in which a whole host of Sunni tribal leaders decided that they had had enough with Al Qaeda, in the Shii’a community the militias standing down to some degrees. So what you had is a combination of political factors inside of Iraq that then came right at the same time as terrific work by our troops. Had those political factors not occurred, I think that my assessment would have been correct.”

So, Obama still refuses to call the surge a success, despite the evident truth that since the surge, Iraq has become a very different place. Did we ever think he would reverse his core position?

His new position can be restated as this:

“The bravery and competence of the American armed forces had little or nothing to do with the improved situation in Iraq. We have the Sunni awakening to thank, because even though our troops did terrific work, it wasn’t that terrific work that changed things.”

Well, he just might be right. And oh so wrong.

There was a certain political, not military, factor that is primarily responsible for the change we see in Iraq. It was George Bush’s commitment to doing it right, even after the 2006 GOP melt-down. Instead of reading the cards that had been dealt and waffling, Bush sent more troops to Iraq. The number wasn’t all that much, but the psychological message to the Iraqi government and those who would overthrow it couldn’t have been more overwhelming: We are going to stay until it’s right, no matter what.

For Maliki and the Iraqi government, it meant breathing room that was needed to carry out new initiatives and check off the boxes on Congress’ checklist for progress.

For al Qaeda it meant their terror efforts building up to the election got them nothing, and they were on the ropes.

For Iran it meant that their continued support of anti-US efforts in Iraq would come at a price to dear for them to pay.

For the Dems in Congress, it meant that America would continue to put the troops and victory first for at least another two years, and there was nothing they could do about it. (And Lord knows, they tried.)

And for our military it meant a green light to continue to work with Shi’a and Sunni alike to create a new set of alliances that Obama merely passes off as Iraqis deciding a new way to go on their own – as if the groundwork laid by military officers in Iraq over the past several years had nothing to do with it.

Maliki’s infamous quote is being passed off as the end of the McCain campaign. Witness Matthew Yglesias today, under the title McCain’s Waterloo:

[McCain had] spent several weeks with the main theme of his campaign being, quite literally, to criticize Barack Obama for not having been physically present in Iraq recently. This (of course) got Obama to go to Iraq, thus setting up a dilemma. Either Obama would survey the “progress” in Iraq and change his position, thus making him a flip-flopper, or else he would refuse to change his position, thus making him obstinate and out of touch with reality. But instead of either of those things happening, Obama went to Iraq and Iraqi leaders said he’d been right all along!

That’s about as close to “game, set, match” as you get in terms of real world events influencing your political campaign.

So it might seem, as long as you’re looking at the world the way Barack Obama does. But about half of us U.S. voters don’t see it that way, and what I, as just one of that group, now see happening is this: Obama will get a false confidence from his trip because he hadn’t been right all along, he just happened to be right at this perfect moment of time, and had he been “right” about the surge as a doomed prospect, Maliki wouldn’t be in a position to be calling for short timeframes today.

Thus, once again, Obama is developing a false read on certain things we hold dear – our military, our commitment to victory – and therefore he has considerable opportunity to plunge from today’s high peak. He is, today, the hare in the race, with McCain plodding along far behind but steady.

The finish line is a long ways away, and my bet’s on the tortoise.

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Update: Bloomberg reports:

Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki hasn’t endorsed any specific plan for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq, a government spokesman said, a day after a magazine report that he backed Barack Obama’s proposal.

Al-Maliki supports a “general vision” of U.S. troop withdrawal from Iraq and has not backed a plan by Obama, the presumptive U.S. Democratic presidential candidate, for a 16- month withdrawal window, government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh said in an e-mailed statement in Baghdad today.

This has certainly set off a swirl of controversy, but it hasn’t changed the core of this post.

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he blogosphere is a very, very prejudiced place because we surround ourselves with like-minded sorts and shun those who hold another view. The stories we bloggers select to write about suffer the same way; we ignore stories that trouble us, and pounce on those that confirm our beliefs, either that we’re right or others are wrong.

Case in point: Spiegel’s interview with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, in which Maliki says that Barack Obama’s 16-month timeframe for a withdrawal from Iraq is the right one, and appeared to encourage people not to vote for candidate with an Iraq plan like … oh … John McCain’s:

“Those who operate on the premise of short time periods in Iraq today are being more realistic. Artificially prolonging the tenure of US troops in Iraq would cause problems.”

The irony of this, of course, is that everything that Obama opposed – foremost the surge – is what’s made it possible. Without the policies endorsed by Bush and McCain, Maliki would not have so optimistic a view of his country’s future. But all that matters politically is that now he does have that view, and Obama will be able to strut about looking brilliant, as if his view on Iraq was always the right view on Iraq.

That makes this story bad, bad news for anyone who feels McCain is better (even marginally) for America’s future than Obama. Maliki’s comments could effectively end the war debate, with Obama’s “See, I told you so” much more resonant than McCain’s “Wait! It was me!” And that makes this story one the leftybloggers love and we conservatives have largely ignored.

Just check out memeorandum. It headlines about a half dozen different news articles and blog posts on the story, including the Spiegel story and a Reuters story that seems to have scooped Spiegel internationally, then links to about 40 news and blog posts on the story. Yes, there are some posts from the conservative side making points similar to those I’ve made above, like this, from The American Mind:

First, realize Maliki sees Obama as the Presidential front runner. It’s rational not to rock the boat. Second, Iraq and the U.S. wouldn’t be in this situation if it weren’t for the surge that quelled violence.

But many many more leftyblogs are listed, making comments like this:

Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki found a pony and it’s name is Obama. While John McSame was busy questioning Obama’s foreign policy credentials the Iraqi Prime Minster was endorsing them.

Or this one from Polimom that cues off the post from The American Mind above:

That is absolutely the McCain campaign’s narrative on Iraq. It has to be, since it’s all they’ve got now. And you can bet your bottom dollar that many millions of Americans will recall — with or without the reminders that are surely coming — that the dire situation that led to the surge was predicated by an incredibly stupid invasion.

Hmmm. How is it that she’s forgotten that Maliki would not be speaking at all about the progress towards a secure democracy in Iraq, were it not for the invasion she still calls “incredibly stupid?” How is it that she’s conveniently dropped the Butcher of Baghdad from her memory? Here’s why: Because, like most of us, she primarily reads the posts and news items she wants to read and ignores the ones she doesn’t.

The blogosphere is not the great equalizer, in which we all graze widely on the field of ideas (oh wait – look, even the grazing sheep are bunched together); rather it is a cafeteria, where we’re free to move about, selecting only the items that appeal to us, and never tasting the ones that don’t. (There are also those strange beings who actively scout out opposing views and leave aggressive, obnoxious comments to irritate the inmates of that particular asylum. That’s a bizarre human dynamic since they are forever assigning themselves losing battles.)

I, too, am guilty of treating the blogosphere as a cafeteria, and it’s easy to understand, since opposing points of view irritate the gut, chafe the senses … and even, occasionally, challenge opinions that are too hard-set. That’s why I do spend a bit of time perusing the opposition, but I confess, I don’t do it often enough.

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he Bush-bashing scribes at AP must have gritted their teeth and ached with every keystroke when writing this story:

AP Exclusive: US removes uranium from Iraq

Here’s the gist of the story (Protect me from the AP copyright demons, most merciful God!): A joint international operation has succeeded in removing 550 metric tons of Saddam Hussein’s yellowcake – that’s 1,212,543 pounds for the metric-impaired – from Iraq to Canada where it will be used to produce reactor fuel.

Of course Saddam had no WMD programs and it never would have occurred to him to spin the yellowcake into reactor fuel … or something richer. No, not nice Mr. Husseiny-weiny.

Still, it was troublesome, and the article tells us that “diplomats” and “military leaders” rejected “the idea” of shipping the stuff overland to “Kuwait’s port on the Persian Gulf” (let’s not bother looking up the name of the place) because the route passes through the “heartland” of Shiites and “extremist factions,” including some in cahoots with “Iran.” (Die AP bots!)

Why worry? Hussein had nothing for us to worry about – that’s just Bush fear-mongering.

While the article speculates on the use of the yellowcake as dirty bombs or panic-inducers, it rambles on with a reference to a certain unnamed diplomat who postulated that Iraq had not purchased yellowcake in Africa. Odd that when Joe Clark was making the claims he was a media celebrity; now that there’s 1,212,543 pounds of the stuff to deal with, he’s just “a former U.S. ambassador.” Curious.

For more fun read Protein Wisdom’s take on the story, Chimpy McHitlerburton’s smirky rodeo ride through history, 25: the last slice of Saddam cake eaten by secret greedy killbots.

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The NY Times Vs. Health And Truth

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recent NYT expose on the horrors of CT scans included this paragraph:

Some medical experts say the American devotion to the newest, most expensive technology is an important reason that the United States spends much more on health care than other industrialized nations — more than $2.2 trillion in 2007, an estimated $7,500 a person, about twice the average in other countries — without providing better care.

Without providing better care? Says who? Name me a country with better medical care – better results – than the good ol’ US of A!

Fortunately, there’s the internet with places like Stats Blog that provide answers to back up my jingoistic enthusiasm:

Last year, the journal Lancet Oncology published a huge comparative study of cancer survival rates in European countries and contrasted them with United States. The results:

Colon and rectal cancer: 65.5 percent in the U.S. vs 56.2 percent in Europe.
Breast cancer: 90.1 percent in the U.S. vs 79 percent in Europe.
Prostate cancer: 99.3 percent in the U.S. vs 77.5 percent in Europe.

All cancers (age adjusted), Men: 66.3 percent in the U.S. vs 47.3 percent in Europe.
All cancers (age adjusted), women: 62.9 percent in the U.S. vs 55.8 percent for women.

No individual country surpassed the U.S. on any of these measures – and these percentage differences add up to lives saved. If that doesn’t amount to “better care,” what does?

Not only to the stats show the inherent anti-American bias that runs rampant and untreated like a staph infection throughout the NYT and the MSM that mock it, it also shows the inherent weakness of socialized medicine. Europe is dominated by Big Brother with a Band-Aid programs of the sort the Dems would ape, yet they ignore the truth for the feeling and continue pushing us down that hopeless road. Continue Reading »

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A friend took issue with Prez Bush’s words in Jerusalem yesterday, specifically this part where he spoke about democracy spreading throughout the Middle East.

From Cairo and Riyadh to Baghdad and Beirut, people will live in free and independent societies, where a desire for peace is reinforced by ties of diplomacy, tourism and trade. Iran and Syria will be peaceful nations, where today’s oppression is a distant memory and people are free to speak their minds and develop their talents. And al-Qaida, Hezbollah and Hamas will be defeated, as Muslims across the region recognize the emptiness of the terrorists’ vision and the injustice of their cause.

He put his concerns into an e-mail last night, and I didn’t get a chance to answer him today, so …

You often tell me, “it isn’t so, just because you say it’s so…”

This sage advice [Suck up! (I love it.)] can be directly applied to today’s comments, and in fact, his entire policy for the region.

“We’ll be welcomed as liberators…”

As it happens, we were welcomed as liberators. But that was before Iraq turned John Kerry on us and didn’t welcome us as liberators after they welcomed us as liberators. Let me count the countries where people pray that some day they will be welcoming us as liberators …

“Mission accomplished.”

Granted, not a perfect PR moment, but it’s been exploited by the Lying Left. They know the mission that was referenced was the toppling of Saddam’s brutal, repressive, murdering rein, a mission that had, in fact, had been accomplished.

“Saddam Hussein is proliferating WMDs…”

I’m amazed that as bright my friend is, he still repeats these easily rebuttable lies. He must know that our intelligence matched up against Germany’s and England’s and Russia’s. He must know that his own beloved Bill Clinton thought Saddam had WMDs. He must know that Saddam was squirreling away money he stole from Oil-for-Food, intending to spend it on WMDs the first moment he could. And he must know that Saddam frustrated UN weapons inspectors at every turn, increasing the rationality of the “Saddam has WMDs” position.

And on, and on, and on…

Bottom line, it is not even close to so, yet he continues to say it is
so.

So because democracy hasn’t spread throughout the Middle East in five short years, we’re supposed to give up on the entire concept and leave that entire huge part of the world continue in its totalitarian, Islamo-theocratic dungeon? And leave the future of the world to the jihadists?

We have two alternatives: Hide behind our borders, something al-Qaeda taught us we cannot do, or continue to try to bring liberation and freedom to the oppressed people on our planet. I’ll choose the latter.

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Chinese Faking Protests?

What, you might ask, are Chinese soldiers doing holding fake Tibetan Buddhist monk robes?

Could they be preparing to stage violent protests by “monks” in order to justify more violent attacks in response by the Chinese military?

That’s an easy conclusion to reach if you read Big Lizard’s Forget It, It’s Chinatown post, which uses Japanese-language blog postings from anti-Communist Chinese nationals living in Japan to hint at what really might be going on with Chinese military action in Tibet … and, incredibly, anti-Chinese Olympic torch demonstrations.

Japanese-language blog postings from anti-Communist Chinese nationals living in Japan? Isn’t the blogosphere amazing?

Clinton Schizophrenia

In public, the public Clinton makes her case that President Bush should boycott the Olympics grand opening in protest to Chinese suppression of pro-religious freedom demonstrations in Tibet.

In private, the somewhat less public Clinton stuffs cash into the couples’ bank accounts, cash “earned” from his position as an advisor to China’s main internet provider, Alibaba, which is helping the Chinese government totalitarians track down and prosecute Tibetan protesters.

Reports the LA Times in a front-page expose today:

Alibaba, which took over Yahoo’s China operation in 2005 as part of a billion-dollar deal with the U.S.-based search engine, arranged for the former president to speak to a conference of Internet executives in Hangzhou in September 2005. Instead of taking his standard speaking fees, which have ranged from $100,000 to $400,000, Clinton accepted an unspecified private donation from Alibaba to his international charity, the William J. Clinton Foundation.

This is the same charity the Clinton’s do not list on Hillary’s Senate financial disclosure forms, despite the fact that it has raised some $500 million, with much of it coming from the Saudi royal family and the sheiks of the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait and Qatar. The Capital Research Center says of the foundation:

Bill Clinton is masterminding his charitable foundation’s fundraising campaign at the same time that he advises his wife’s presidential campaign. Might that create some conflicts of interest? At the very least, linking nonprofit fundraising to political proximity is sure to generate lots of philanthropic clout—but to what end? Bill Clinton promises to disclose the names of donors to the William J. Clinton Foundation when his wife becomes president. How reassuring.

The wrap-up of the LAT story was pretty amazing:

Human rights activists said clear evidence of Alibaba’s collaboration with China’s state security apparatus surfaced last month with the appearance of a “most wanted” posting for Tibetan rioters on the firm’s Yahoo China homepage.

The postings, which appeared March 15 on both Yahoo China and Microsoft’s MSN China homepage, carried photos of suspected rioters and a phone number for informants to call. The postings vanished later the same day after news accounts highlighted them.

Yahoo officials said they had no advance warning from Alibaba that the postings would run. “We made our concerns known that the displays were inappropriate,” one Yahoo official said, but were told by Alibaba officials “that it was a standard news feed.”

The Clinton foundation spokeswoman would not address Alibaba’s role in aiding the crackdown in Tibet. Instead, she emphasized the former president’s efforts to push AIDS relief in China. “He has both pushed and helped the government of China to acknowledge and tackle the growing HIV-AIDs crisis facing their country,” she said.

I’m struggling here to figure out why funding AIDs relief answers questions about Clinton failing to support human rights in China because he’s taken money from the Commie oppressors. And I’m failing to see how Hillary Clinton can be president without Bill Clinton influencing her every move.

And I’m sure the Obama camp is happy it has the LAT working so hard for him.

Politics, Italian Style

That’s the derrier of Italian porn star whore Millie D’Abbraccio, and it’s gracing not a movie poster, but her campaign poster for a seat on Rome’s City Council.

She’s running as a Socialist. Surprise!

And here’s her the big idea of her campaign:

If elected, D’Abbraccio wants to create a red light area with strip clubs, erotic discos and sex shops called “Love City” just kilometers away from the Vatican.

“It would be something cute, clean — nothing to do with prostitution,” said the actress whose films include “The Kiss of the Cobra” and “Paolina Borghese, Imperial Nymphomaniac.” (source)

Cute and clean. Uh-huh. As screwed up as DC is, and as far out as our leftists are, things here are better, far better, than they are in Europe.

Which is why leftists love Europe so much.

BBC Warming Wilt Chronicled

In last week’s Sunday Scan, I ran a piece documenting how BBC had edited a news item on lower global temperatures to basically take out any reference to lower global temperatures.

Now The [UK] Register has run the series of emails between Warmie fundamentalist Jo Abbess and Beeb editor Roger Harrabin that resulted in BBC cowering in fear of being branded a “global warming skeptic.”

The exchange started hot and got hotter, with Abbess finally threatening Harabin:

“It would be better if you did not quote the sceptics. Their voice is heard everywhere, on every channel. They are deliberately obstructing the emergence of the truth. I would ask : please reserve the main BBC Online channel for emerging truth.” [Our emphasis]

Abbess was worried about the consequences of Harrabin’s report. People might think The Wrong Thoughts. She spelled it out:

“A lot of people will read the first few paragraphs of what you say, and not read the rest, and (a) Dismiss your writing as it seems you have been manipulated by the sceptics or (b) Jump on it with glee and email their mates and say “See! Global Warming has stopped !”

And she signed off with a threat:

“I am about to send your comments to others for their contribution, unless you request I do not. They are likely to want to post your comments on forums/fora, so please indicate if you do not want this to happen. You may appear in an unfavourable light because it could be said that you have had your head turned by the sceptics.”

Harrabin meekly responded:

“Have a look in 10 minutes and tell me you are happier. We have changed headline and more.”

So the initial copy …

This would mean global temperatures have not risen since 1998, prompting some to question climate change theory. But experts say we are still clearly in a long-term warming trend – and they forecast a new record high temperature within five years.

… became:

But this year’s temperature would still be way above the average – and we would soon exceed the record year of 1998 because of global warming induced by greenhouse gases.

If the debate on global warming is over, how come Abbess had to debate BBC into changing its story?

And if the media is to be believed, why did BBC fold?

BTW, a Google search on Jo Abbess now turns up a relatively strong 110,000 hits. I dug three pages into it and every link had to do with this scandal. God bless the blogosphere.

hat-tip: Icecap

Green Vs. Green Combat

And while we’re on the subject of strange happenings in the Greenie/Warmie world, I must pass along this story from the NYT as the story that gave me the most giggles in the last week:

SUNNYVALE, Calif. — Call it an eco-parable: one Prius-driving couple takes pride in their eight redwoods, the first of them planted over a decade ago. Their electric-car-driving neighbors take pride in their rooftop solar panels, installed five years after the first trees were planted.

Trees — redwoods, live oaks or blossoming fruit trees — are usually considered sturdy citizens of the sun-swept peninsula south of San Francisco, not criminal elements. But under a 1978 state law protecting homeowners’ investment in rooftop solar panels, trees that impede solar panels’ access to the sun can be deemed a nuisance and their owners fined up to $1,000 a day. The Solar Shade Act was a curiosity until late last year, when a dispute over the eight redwoods (a k a Tree No. 1, Tree No. 2, Tree No. 3, etc.) ended up in Santa Clara County criminal court.

The couple who planted the trees, Carolynn Bissett and Richard Treanor, were convicted of violating the law, based on the complaint of their neighbor, Mark Vargas, and were ordered to make sure that no more than 10 percent of the solar panels are shaded.

A few weeks after The San Jose Mercury News wrote about the situation, the first act ended with the couple pruning 10 feet to 15 feet of Tree No. 6’s upper branches. The event drew more cameras than an episode of “Extreme Home Makeover.”

The Bissett-Treanor team responded as liberals will — they turned to Big Brother, specifically in the form of Joe Simitian, a Dem (natch) state senator from nearby Palo Alto, who now will busy the state legislature with a new bill that will grandfather the owners of trees that pre-existed the installation of neighboring solar panels from prosecution under The Solar Shade Act.

The story concludes:

The state, Mr. Simitian pointed out, has a law to encourage the construction of one million solar roofs. “I’m trying to avoid a million neighborhood arguments,” he said.

Yes, that would be a lot of hot air.

Maoist Moron

In case you thought nothing much happened in San Francisco this week because the Chinese conspired with the Newsome administration to re-route the Olympic torch parade, you’d do well to visit this lengthy and impressive photo album at Pajamas media.

It was, in fact, quite a show with multiple anti-Chinese causes present and plenty of hostility flaring between pro- and anti-Chinese factions. Included is this photo of some anti-Chinese street theater:

Note the long-haired imbecile on the left in the Mao t-shirt. Who wears a Mao t-shirt on any day, and who is idiotic enough to wear one to an anti-China demonstration?

Beware when the left embraces your cause, because lame-brains will be coming to your side.

hat-tip: Jim

Five Years In Iraq

The invaluable MEMRI marked the fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq with excerpts from articles written by liberal Muslim commentators, all of which are worth reading.

I particularly liked this excerpt from an interview by Iraqi Journalist ‘Abd Al-Jabbar Al-’Atabihad of a news vendor in Baghdad. He asked the vendor how he felt on the anniversary of the invasion and was told:

“At the start of my journey I stopped by the newspaper seller to ask how he was after five years of change. He said: I will sum up what you ask in a few words. Despite everything that happened and is happening, I feel pride in the fact that the years of dictatorship are gone. There were no worse years than those, when we were afraid of our own shadows and our own children. I won’t claim that the situation now is ideal, but compared to the past, it is much better, without any comparison…

Despite the sorrows I find in our present situation, I feel relieved. In the days [of the dictatorship] I didn’t feel optimistic. Now, I am optimistic about what is to come. What is happening now is passing; while it has gone on long, it will end – it could end in the twinkle of an eye.

How do liberals, who are supposed to be the strongest champions of freedom, oppose the war in Iraq when it is so obvious that the work we are doing there is the good, hard work of defending freedom, and freeing the oppressed?

Also in the MEMRI post is an “Apology to the Valiant American Soldier” by Iraqi liberal (truly liberal, as opposed to the shameful disgraces that constitute liberalism in the US today) Khudayr Taher. Its beauty surpasses mere words; it is much deserved blessing for our troops:

“We forsook you and betrayed you – we, whose history is an expression of massacres, conflagrations, and ruin. We killed you, and we killed our dream and aspiration of reaching the sun, the moon, and the stars – [we killed our dream] of availing ourselves of the opportunity to live as true humans, thanks to your presence.

“My dear, brave American soldier, you noble individual who traversed land and sea in order to write the story of Iraqi freedom for the first time in its modern history – you believed, in accordance with logic, self-evident truths, and rational thought, that a people who had been subjected to repression, starvation, and killing would dance for joy, and would thank Allah who sent you to them as a liberating angel. [You believed that] they would strew flowers and break out in songs of joy that would smash the chains of slavery, ignominy, and humiliation.

“Not even a writer of surrealistic [literature] or [theater of] the absurd would have imagined that the Iraqi people would revolt against their liberator and would rush ardently back to a new bondage of a different kind – that of the religious cleric, the tribal sheikh, and the gang leader. It was unthinkable that the people would go against logic, rational thought, and self-evident truths, in a mad rush towards the abyss and total ruin.

“My beloved, brave American soldier, we apologize to you, and we are saddened at our wretched and miserable selves. Since we are a people that slaughters itself, and kills one another, cutting off heads, what can you expect from us other than ingratitude, perfidy, and stabbing you in the back for the benefit of Iranian and Syrian intelligence and Al-Qaeda?…”

Pass that one along, will you?

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