Peer Pressure are four horny guys from Alabama who get freaky with furniture. Videos of their sexy dance routines are spreading across the internet like a particularly contagious thing that spreads very, very quickly, especially the clip where they virtually gang-rape a leatherette foot rest. But beef has broken out between Peer Pressure and another sexy cyber dance troupe, each wanting to win the webcam dry-humping war. Louisiana's Fantasy Boiz are generating a lot of heat with their front-room frottage. The pressure is now on to see who can sexually assault their mom's sofa the hardest. We caught up with Peer Pressure to see how they were preparing...
http://vice.typepad.com/vice_magazine/2007/05/alabama.html#more
Thursday, May 31, 2007
Wednesday, May 30, 2007
What No One Is Telling You About Our Talks With Iran.
Watching the pundits discuss our historic meeting with Iran, you would have mostly heard despair at the notion that we have no leverage in these talks, and so therefor why would Iran give on anything? Why would they stop waging war against us in iraq if they have nothing to fear? To all the experts in the media, the whole thing seemed like some grand puzzlement. Was it just an attempt to appease the administration’s domestic critics who have been chiding it for not engaging in diplomacy ( a vaguery if there ever was one ) with the world’s top terrorist? No one you heard from could really quite grasp what was going on.
For some reason, no one told you that just 5 days before Monday’s talks, an entire floating army, with nearly 20,000 men, comprising the world’s largest naval strike force, led by the USS Nimitz and the USS Stennis, and also comprising the largest U.S. Naval armada in the Persian Gulf since 2003, came floating up unnanounced through the Straight of Hormuz, and rested right on Iran’s back doorstep, guns pointed at them. The demonstration of leverage was clear. And it also came on the exact date of the expiration of the 60 day grace period the U.N. had granted Iran.
And it came just a few weeks after Vice President Dick Cheney had swept through the region and delivered a very clear and pointed message to the Saudi King Abdullah and others: George Bush has unequivocally decided to attack Iran’s nuclear, military and economic infrastructure if they do not abandon their drive for military nuclear capability. Plain and simple. Iran heard the message as well, and although a lack of leverage may seem clear to America’s retired military tv talking heads, it is not so clear to the government in Tehran.
The message to both Iran and Syria is that if the talks in Baghdad fail, the military option is ready to go.
Watching the pundits discuss our historic meeting with Iran, you would have mostly heard despair at the notion that we have no leverage in these talks, and so therefor why would Iran give on anything? Why would they stop waging war against us in iraq if they have nothing to fear? To all the experts in the media, the whole thing seemed like some grand puzzlement. Was it just an attempt to appease the administration’s domestic critics who have been chiding it for not engaging in diplomacy ( a vaguery if there ever was one ) with the world’s top terrorist? No one you heard from could really quite grasp what was going on.
For some reason, no one told you that just 5 days before Monday’s talks, an entire floating army, with nearly 20,000 men, comprising the world’s largest naval strike force, led by the USS Nimitz and the USS Stennis, and also comprising the largest U.S. Naval armada in the Persian Gulf since 2003, came floating up unnanounced through the Straight of Hormuz, and rested right on Iran’s back doorstep, guns pointed at them. The demonstration of leverage was clear. And it also came on the exact date of the expiration of the 60 day grace period the U.N. had granted Iran.
And it came just a few weeks after Vice President Dick Cheney had swept through the region and delivered a very clear and pointed message to the Saudi King Abdullah and others: George Bush has unequivocally decided to attack Iran’s nuclear, military and economic infrastructure if they do not abandon their drive for military nuclear capability. Plain and simple. Iran heard the message as well, and although a lack of leverage may seem clear to America’s retired military tv talking heads, it is not so clear to the government in Tehran.
The message to both Iran and Syria is that if the talks in Baghdad fail, the military option is ready to go.
The Business
First and Long — Very Long
By JOE NOCERA
Bill Hambrecht is a rich old Wall Street guy who has made his money tilting at windmills and disrupting the establishment. “That’s what I do,” he says. “It’s fun.” Almost a decade ago, at 62, he founded WR Hambrecht + Company, whose fundamental premise is that companies don’t need to use Wall Street investment bankers — and pay their outrageous fees — to go public. Hambrecht + Company has since become so threatening to traditional underwriters that they often refuse to be involved in any I.P.O. in which his firm takes part.
And now, at an age when most people are well into retirement, he has decided to tackle the establishment again. This time, though, the establishment isn’t Wall Street. It’s the National Football League. Bill Hambrecht, you see, is starting up a professional football league. So far, he and his partner, Tim Armstrong, a senior executive at Google, have pledged $2 million each. They’ve hired a C.E.O. and a C.O.O., both of whom cut their teeth at the National Basketball Association. They’ve got a name: the United Football League. And they’ve lined up a wealthy, well-known businessman as their first owner: Mark Cuban, the billionaire who owns the N.B.A.’s Dallas Mavericks. Like Hambrecht, Cuban loves nothing more than confronting the status quo.
Obviously, the U.F.L. is still in the early planning stages. It hasn’t yet hired a single football person and is still hunting for seven more owners with Cuban’s deep pockets and contrarian mindset, so that the league can begin with eight teams. It could easily fall apart before the first kickoff. Indeed, there has already been one setback: Boone Pickens, the oilman turned-corporate-raider-turned-billionaire-hedge-fund manager, recently abandoned his intention to buy a team. But Cuban remains committed, and if all goes according to plan, the U.F.L. will play its first preseason games in August 2008. I kid you not.
Hambrecht has been thinking unconventional thoughts about pro football for a long time. Back in the early 1980s, he was a minority partner in the Oakland Invaders, one of the original franchises of the late, unlamented United States Football League, a spring league that played its games during the N.F.L.’s off-season. The U.S.F.L. folded in 1985, after three seasons. “It was started by a bunch of guys who were riding high because of the S.&L. boom,” Hambrecht recalls. “As soon as the boom turned to bust, the league went broke.”
Most of us would go through such an experience and conclude, Never again. Not Hambrecht. He was convinced that the U.S.F.L. could have worked with a smarter game plan and owners who were more patient. At various times he discussed a new league with NBC, CBS and Fox, but those talks went nowhere. Then one day last year, Hambrecht told Tim Armstrong, whom he met when his firm helped manage Google’s initial public offering, about his dream of a new football league. The more Armstrong heard, the more excited he got. By October, the two men had committed their $2 million, hired their first three executives (Bill Daugherty, the C.E.O.; Jon Brod, the C.O.O.; and Andrew Goldberg, a senior analyst) and begun an extensive study to see if the idea was really feasible.
Let’s now take a moment to consider what the U.F.L. will be up against: a monopolistic sports league utterly unafraid to take advantage of its monopoly power. Over the years, the N.F.L. has squashed four competitors, most recently the NBC- and World Wrestling Federation-backed XFL in 2001. Right now, Arena Football is an alternate league, but it’s a marginal thing, with negligible TV ratings and an average of 12,000 fans per game. And with eight players to a side, games in the N.F.L.’s off-season and a field that looks like a hockey rink, it’s not exactly “real” football.
Where others might be daunted by the N.F.L.’s success and power, though, Hambrecht came to believe its monopoly status gave him an opening. “I really started thinking hard about this after the Los Angeles Rams left to go to St. Louis and the Houston Oilers went to Nashville,” he told me over drinks recently. “Why do you leave two of the top 10 TV markets in the country for these two smaller markets?”
The answer, of course, is that the N.F.L. doesn’t really have to worry about where its teams are located, since most games are televised and the bulk of the league’s revenues come from its network contracts. What’s more, with the right stadium deal and enough corporate sponsorship, team owners can make as much (or more) money in smaller cities as they can in larger ones. That’s why the N.F.L. does just fine despite not fielding a team in 21 of the country’s top 50 markets — including such enormous metropolitan areas as San Antonio, Las Vegas, Orlando and (of course) Los Angeles. Nor does the N.F.L., which now has 32 teams, have much incentive to expand. On the contrary: expansion dilutes the TV money. (Greg Aiello, the N.F.L.’s spokesman, told me that “expansion isn’t on the table right now.”)
So the first step in Hambrecht’s plan is to enter big cities where the N.F.L. isn’t. As Mark Cuban put it to me in an e-mail, “There are quite a few good-sized non-N.F.L. cities that can support a pro team.” So far, the U.F.L. has decided to put teams in Los Angeles, Las Vegas and Mexico City. (Cuban is considering taking the Las Vegas franchise.) Each owner will put up $30 million, giving him an initial half-interest in the team; the league will own the other half. But eventually the fans themselves will become shareholders — because each team is going to sell shares to the public. Then the owner, the league and the fans will each own a third of every franchise.
Hambrecht and his executives believe that the initial public offerings will raise, on average, another $60 million per team, giving it about $90 million in working capital. They also hope that the stock sale will create intense fan loyalty. “This is going to be a very accessible league,” says Daugherty, the C.E.O. “Fans will own a piece of the team, and they’ll get tickets at more affordable prices.”
Hambrecht expects his owners to be wealthy — and patient — enough to absorb losses for up to five years. The league will need a television contract, of course, but its existence is not predicated on a megabucks deal, at least not at first. The U.F.L. is open to making a smaller deal with a cable network like USA, TNT or Comcast’s Versus network (the former OLN). One mistake other leagues have made, Hambrecht believes, is counting on an upfront TV deal — and bringing in owners who expect to make money instantly.
One television advantage the U.F.L. will have is Friday night. Thanks to the 1961 Sports Broadcasting Act, the N.F.L. is prohibited from televising games on most autumn Friday nights. (The prohibition was meant to protect high-school football.) Any new league would have televised football all to itself on that evening.
A new league’s biggest issue, though, is whether it really can approximate the N.F.L.’s level of play. As Daugherty puts it, “If you don’t put a good product on the field, nothing else matters.” When he first signed on, he and Brod immediately began looking into that question — and they came away convinced they could land decent players right away, and very good players eventually.
“Bill Walsh used to tell me that the last 20 players cut from every team were almost interchangeable with the last 20 players to make the team,” Hambrecht says. The new league will hire the best of those last 20 players — along with the best of the Arena players, the Canadian Football League players and so on. Though the U.F.L. will have a salary cap, it will be able to pay those players more than they are making now. It won’t be able to afford to sign marquee names like Peyton Manning or the biggest stars coming out of college, obviously. But the U.F.L. will be able to offer most rookies, who aren’t top draft choices, far more money than the N.F.L. would give them. And since the N.F.L. salary cap has been negotiated with the players’ union, it can’t be unilaterally changed.
“The average career of an N.F.L. player is less than four years,” Daugherty says. “They have a huge incentive to maximize their income.” The new league’s officials think they’ll be able to sign players drafted by the N.F.L. in the second round and later. And one former N.F.L. coach I spoke to — who asked not to be named because he didn’t want people to know he had spoken to the U.F.L. — agreed. “They are going to be able to get players and coaches,” he said. “That’s not going to be a problem.” It’s also worth remembering that many late-round draft choices are good football players. Tom Brady, for instance, was a sixth-round draft choice.
As U.F.L. executives see it, there has really only been one competing league that took the approach they want to take: the old American Football League. The A.F.L. played “11 on 11” football in the fall, mostly in cities where the N.F.L. did not. Its founder, Lamar Hunt, pioneered the concept of revenue-sharing and built a unified league with the staying power to last nine years before it merged with the N.F.L. That is the model the new league wants to emulate. Whether the ultimate goal is to merge with the N.F.L. or play alongside it — well, that’s the one place Hambrecht wasn’t going to go with me. “We’ll just see how it plays out,” he said.
When I asked Roger Noll, a sports economist at Stanford University, whether it is possible to compete with the N.F.L., he laughed, but he didn’t scoff. “The crucial barrier to entry is finding stadiums in the biggest cities,” he replied — something U.F.L. executives insist is not a problem in the places they are considering. “If you can do that, it would be easy to have a league.” Noll pointed out that for wealthy people who want to own a football team, it is far cheaper to start a new league than to try to land an expansion team — which, assuming that the N.F.L. were interested, would cost upward of $800 million. “You need to have enough money to experience losses that will amount to 20 to 30 percent of revenue in the first three or four years,” he said. It’s much cheaper to lose money over that time than to purchase an N.F.L. franchise.
When we met, Hambrecht said: “A guy asked me, ‘Why are you doing this?’ ” He shrugged. “I had trouble explaining, except that it made logical sense.” On paper, it does. Whether it plays out that way in real life — who can say? But it’ll be fun to watch. Bill Hambrecht ventures usually are.
Joe Nocera is a business columnist for The New York Times.
First and Long — Very Long
By JOE NOCERA
Bill Hambrecht is a rich old Wall Street guy who has made his money tilting at windmills and disrupting the establishment. “That’s what I do,” he says. “It’s fun.” Almost a decade ago, at 62, he founded WR Hambrecht + Company, whose fundamental premise is that companies don’t need to use Wall Street investment bankers — and pay their outrageous fees — to go public. Hambrecht + Company has since become so threatening to traditional underwriters that they often refuse to be involved in any I.P.O. in which his firm takes part.
And now, at an age when most people are well into retirement, he has decided to tackle the establishment again. This time, though, the establishment isn’t Wall Street. It’s the National Football League. Bill Hambrecht, you see, is starting up a professional football league. So far, he and his partner, Tim Armstrong, a senior executive at Google, have pledged $2 million each. They’ve hired a C.E.O. and a C.O.O., both of whom cut their teeth at the National Basketball Association. They’ve got a name: the United Football League. And they’ve lined up a wealthy, well-known businessman as their first owner: Mark Cuban, the billionaire who owns the N.B.A.’s Dallas Mavericks. Like Hambrecht, Cuban loves nothing more than confronting the status quo.
Obviously, the U.F.L. is still in the early planning stages. It hasn’t yet hired a single football person and is still hunting for seven more owners with Cuban’s deep pockets and contrarian mindset, so that the league can begin with eight teams. It could easily fall apart before the first kickoff. Indeed, there has already been one setback: Boone Pickens, the oilman turned-corporate-raider-turned-billionaire-hedge-fund manager, recently abandoned his intention to buy a team. But Cuban remains committed, and if all goes according to plan, the U.F.L. will play its first preseason games in August 2008. I kid you not.
Hambrecht has been thinking unconventional thoughts about pro football for a long time. Back in the early 1980s, he was a minority partner in the Oakland Invaders, one of the original franchises of the late, unlamented United States Football League, a spring league that played its games during the N.F.L.’s off-season. The U.S.F.L. folded in 1985, after three seasons. “It was started by a bunch of guys who were riding high because of the S.&L. boom,” Hambrecht recalls. “As soon as the boom turned to bust, the league went broke.”
Most of us would go through such an experience and conclude, Never again. Not Hambrecht. He was convinced that the U.S.F.L. could have worked with a smarter game plan and owners who were more patient. At various times he discussed a new league with NBC, CBS and Fox, but those talks went nowhere. Then one day last year, Hambrecht told Tim Armstrong, whom he met when his firm helped manage Google’s initial public offering, about his dream of a new football league. The more Armstrong heard, the more excited he got. By October, the two men had committed their $2 million, hired their first three executives (Bill Daugherty, the C.E.O.; Jon Brod, the C.O.O.; and Andrew Goldberg, a senior analyst) and begun an extensive study to see if the idea was really feasible.
Let’s now take a moment to consider what the U.F.L. will be up against: a monopolistic sports league utterly unafraid to take advantage of its monopoly power. Over the years, the N.F.L. has squashed four competitors, most recently the NBC- and World Wrestling Federation-backed XFL in 2001. Right now, Arena Football is an alternate league, but it’s a marginal thing, with negligible TV ratings and an average of 12,000 fans per game. And with eight players to a side, games in the N.F.L.’s off-season and a field that looks like a hockey rink, it’s not exactly “real” football.
Where others might be daunted by the N.F.L.’s success and power, though, Hambrecht came to believe its monopoly status gave him an opening. “I really started thinking hard about this after the Los Angeles Rams left to go to St. Louis and the Houston Oilers went to Nashville,” he told me over drinks recently. “Why do you leave two of the top 10 TV markets in the country for these two smaller markets?”
The answer, of course, is that the N.F.L. doesn’t really have to worry about where its teams are located, since most games are televised and the bulk of the league’s revenues come from its network contracts. What’s more, with the right stadium deal and enough corporate sponsorship, team owners can make as much (or more) money in smaller cities as they can in larger ones. That’s why the N.F.L. does just fine despite not fielding a team in 21 of the country’s top 50 markets — including such enormous metropolitan areas as San Antonio, Las Vegas, Orlando and (of course) Los Angeles. Nor does the N.F.L., which now has 32 teams, have much incentive to expand. On the contrary: expansion dilutes the TV money. (Greg Aiello, the N.F.L.’s spokesman, told me that “expansion isn’t on the table right now.”)
So the first step in Hambrecht’s plan is to enter big cities where the N.F.L. isn’t. As Mark Cuban put it to me in an e-mail, “There are quite a few good-sized non-N.F.L. cities that can support a pro team.” So far, the U.F.L. has decided to put teams in Los Angeles, Las Vegas and Mexico City. (Cuban is considering taking the Las Vegas franchise.) Each owner will put up $30 million, giving him an initial half-interest in the team; the league will own the other half. But eventually the fans themselves will become shareholders — because each team is going to sell shares to the public. Then the owner, the league and the fans will each own a third of every franchise.
Hambrecht and his executives believe that the initial public offerings will raise, on average, another $60 million per team, giving it about $90 million in working capital. They also hope that the stock sale will create intense fan loyalty. “This is going to be a very accessible league,” says Daugherty, the C.E.O. “Fans will own a piece of the team, and they’ll get tickets at more affordable prices.”
Hambrecht expects his owners to be wealthy — and patient — enough to absorb losses for up to five years. The league will need a television contract, of course, but its existence is not predicated on a megabucks deal, at least not at first. The U.F.L. is open to making a smaller deal with a cable network like USA, TNT or Comcast’s Versus network (the former OLN). One mistake other leagues have made, Hambrecht believes, is counting on an upfront TV deal — and bringing in owners who expect to make money instantly.
One television advantage the U.F.L. will have is Friday night. Thanks to the 1961 Sports Broadcasting Act, the N.F.L. is prohibited from televising games on most autumn Friday nights. (The prohibition was meant to protect high-school football.) Any new league would have televised football all to itself on that evening.
A new league’s biggest issue, though, is whether it really can approximate the N.F.L.’s level of play. As Daugherty puts it, “If you don’t put a good product on the field, nothing else matters.” When he first signed on, he and Brod immediately began looking into that question — and they came away convinced they could land decent players right away, and very good players eventually.
“Bill Walsh used to tell me that the last 20 players cut from every team were almost interchangeable with the last 20 players to make the team,” Hambrecht says. The new league will hire the best of those last 20 players — along with the best of the Arena players, the Canadian Football League players and so on. Though the U.F.L. will have a salary cap, it will be able to pay those players more than they are making now. It won’t be able to afford to sign marquee names like Peyton Manning or the biggest stars coming out of college, obviously. But the U.F.L. will be able to offer most rookies, who aren’t top draft choices, far more money than the N.F.L. would give them. And since the N.F.L. salary cap has been negotiated with the players’ union, it can’t be unilaterally changed.
“The average career of an N.F.L. player is less than four years,” Daugherty says. “They have a huge incentive to maximize their income.” The new league’s officials think they’ll be able to sign players drafted by the N.F.L. in the second round and later. And one former N.F.L. coach I spoke to — who asked not to be named because he didn’t want people to know he had spoken to the U.F.L. — agreed. “They are going to be able to get players and coaches,” he said. “That’s not going to be a problem.” It’s also worth remembering that many late-round draft choices are good football players. Tom Brady, for instance, was a sixth-round draft choice.
As U.F.L. executives see it, there has really only been one competing league that took the approach they want to take: the old American Football League. The A.F.L. played “11 on 11” football in the fall, mostly in cities where the N.F.L. did not. Its founder, Lamar Hunt, pioneered the concept of revenue-sharing and built a unified league with the staying power to last nine years before it merged with the N.F.L. That is the model the new league wants to emulate. Whether the ultimate goal is to merge with the N.F.L. or play alongside it — well, that’s the one place Hambrecht wasn’t going to go with me. “We’ll just see how it plays out,” he said.
When I asked Roger Noll, a sports economist at Stanford University, whether it is possible to compete with the N.F.L., he laughed, but he didn’t scoff. “The crucial barrier to entry is finding stadiums in the biggest cities,” he replied — something U.F.L. executives insist is not a problem in the places they are considering. “If you can do that, it would be easy to have a league.” Noll pointed out that for wealthy people who want to own a football team, it is far cheaper to start a new league than to try to land an expansion team — which, assuming that the N.F.L. were interested, would cost upward of $800 million. “You need to have enough money to experience losses that will amount to 20 to 30 percent of revenue in the first three or four years,” he said. It’s much cheaper to lose money over that time than to purchase an N.F.L. franchise.
When we met, Hambrecht said: “A guy asked me, ‘Why are you doing this?’ ” He shrugged. “I had trouble explaining, except that it made logical sense.” On paper, it does. Whether it plays out that way in real life — who can say? But it’ll be fun to watch. Bill Hambrecht ventures usually are.
Joe Nocera is a business columnist for The New York Times.
Friday, May 25, 2007
MONTGOMERY, Ala. (AP) - Hogzilla is being made into a horror movie. But the sequel may be even bigger: Meet Monster Pig. An 11-year-old Alabama boy used a pistol to kill a wild hog his father says weighed a staggering 1,051 pounds and measured 9-feet-4 from the tip of its snout to the base of its tail. Think hams as big as car tires.
If the claims are accurate, Jamison Stone's trophy boar would be bigger than Hogzilla, the famed wild hog that grew to seemingly mythical proportions after being killed in south Georgia in 2004.
Hogzilla originally was thought to weigh 1,000 pounds and measure 12 feet in length. National Geographic experts who unearthed its remains believe the animal actually weighed about 800 pounds and was 8 feet long.
Regardless of the comparison, Jamison is reveling in the attention over his pig, which has a Web site put up by his father—http://www.monsterpig.com —that is generating Internet buzz.
"It feels really good," Jamison, of Pickensville, said in a telephone interview with The Associated Press. "It's a good accomplishment. I probably won't ever kill anything else that big."
If the claims are accurate, Jamison Stone's trophy boar would be bigger than Hogzilla, the famed wild hog that grew to seemingly mythical proportions after being killed in south Georgia in 2004.
Hogzilla originally was thought to weigh 1,000 pounds and measure 12 feet in length. National Geographic experts who unearthed its remains believe the animal actually weighed about 800 pounds and was 8 feet long.
Regardless of the comparison, Jamison is reveling in the attention over his pig, which has a Web site put up by his father—http://www.monsterpig.com —that is generating Internet buzz.
"It feels really good," Jamison, of Pickensville, said in a telephone interview with The Associated Press. "It's a good accomplishment. I probably won't ever kill anything else that big."
www.opinionjournal.com
The 'Crime' of Being Christian http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1178708675932&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull
"Saudi officials have arrested a man in Mecca for being a Christian, saying that the city, which Muslims consider to be holy, is off-limits to non-Muslims," the Jerusalem Post reports:
*** QUOTE ***
Nirosh Kamanda, a Sri Lankan Christian, was detained by the Saudi Expatriates Monitoring Committee last week after he started to sell goods outside Mecca's Great Mosque.
After running his fingerprints through a new security system, Saudi police discovered that he was a Christian who had arrived in the country six months earlier to take a job as a truck driver in the city of Dammam. Kamanda had subsequently left his place of work and moved to Mecca.
"The Grand Mosque and the holy city are forbidden to non-Muslims," Col. Suhail Matrafi, head of the department of Expatriates Affairs in Mecca, told the Saudi daily Arab News. "The new fingerprints system is very helpful and will help us a lot to discover the identity of a lot of criminals," he said.
*** END QUOTE ***
Last week we noted http://www.opinionjournal.com/best/?id=110010088#phobia that the Organization of the Islamic Conference was complaining about "Islamophobia." But we don't know of any city in the West that is off-limits to Muslims. When Christians, Jews and atheists are free to visit Mecca and Medina, we'll take "Islamophobia" seriously.
"Saudi officials have arrested a man in Mecca for being a Christian, saying that the city, which Muslims consider to be holy, is off-limits to non-Muslims," the Jerusalem Post reports:
*** QUOTE ***
Nirosh Kamanda, a Sri Lankan Christian, was detained by the Saudi Expatriates Monitoring Committee last week after he started to sell goods outside Mecca's Great Mosque.
After running his fingerprints through a new security system, Saudi police discovered that he was a Christian who had arrived in the country six months earlier to take a job as a truck driver in the city of Dammam. Kamanda had subsequently left his place of work and moved to Mecca.
"The Grand Mosque and the holy city are forbidden to non-Muslims," Col. Suhail Matrafi, head of the department of Expatriates Affairs in Mecca, told the Saudi daily Arab News. "The new fingerprints system is very helpful and will help us a lot to discover the identity of a lot of criminals," he said.
*** END QUOTE ***
Last week we noted http://www.opinionjournal.com/best/?id=110010088#phobia that the Organization of the Islamic Conference was complaining about "Islamophobia." But we don't know of any city in the West that is off-limits to Muslims. When Christians, Jews and atheists are free to visit Mecca and Medina, we'll take "Islamophobia" seriously.
Wednesday, May 23, 2007
Before we talk about the disappointment of all the teams who didn't win the first or second pick in last night's NBA Draft Lottery, let's look at the team that did win, the Portland Trail Blazers. (The official favorite team of Henry Abbott at True Hoop, who was at the lottery last night and, amusingly, is only a month-plus into his ESPN tenure and is already praising the free buffets.) CNBC's Darren Rovell crunches the numbers and finds the Trail Blazers' good fortune is going to net them about $6.3 million next year alone.
Though some Portland fans have already put together a Draft Kevin Durant blog, it seems likely that Greg Oden is going to be the first pick, and Durant's going to be playing in either Seattle or Oklahoma City. For all the disappointed teams and fans this morning, Portland -- a franchise that has been trying to crawl its way back -- and Seattle -- a franchise that just found itself a desperately needed identity -- were the lucky winners. Before we delve into those whose hearts were crushed, we salute the Pacific Northwest, which might very well be the center of the NBA universe for the next, oh, 10 years ago. Well, if Seattle keeps its team, anyway.
Though some Portland fans have already put together a Draft Kevin Durant blog, it seems likely that Greg Oden is going to be the first pick, and Durant's going to be playing in either Seattle or Oklahoma City. For all the disappointed teams and fans this morning, Portland -- a franchise that has been trying to crawl its way back -- and Seattle -- a franchise that just found itself a desperately needed identity -- were the lucky winners. Before we delve into those whose hearts were crushed, we salute the Pacific Northwest, which might very well be the center of the NBA universe for the next, oh, 10 years ago. Well, if Seattle keeps its team, anyway.
Ace really nails it with this post, on the politically correct media’s unbelievable scrambling to obfuscate and downplay the disturbing results of the Pew Research poll on Muslims in the United States:
A Day of Shocks: Media Spins or Ignores Disturbing Finding That Quarter of American Muslim Young Men Support Terrorism.
Previously at LGF: Pew Survey: US Muslims ‘Mainstream?’
AP Spins in Both Directions
VOA Ignores Support for Terrorism, Sees Backlash and Islamophobia
A Day of Shocks: Media Spins or Ignores Disturbing Finding That Quarter of American Muslim Young Men Support Terrorism.
Previously at LGF: Pew Survey: US Muslims ‘Mainstream?’
AP Spins in Both Directions
VOA Ignores Support for Terrorism, Sees Backlash and Islamophobia
Tuesday, May 22, 2007
Awesome.
Mick Jagger tried to enlarge penis by letting bees sting it
BANG Showbiz
May. 22, 2007 07:26 AM
Mick Jagger reportedly tried to enlarge his penis by letting bees sting it.The Rolling Stones frontman, whose "small penis" was mocked by a former lover, covered his manhood in bees in the hope that their stings would cause it to swell.Film director Julien Temple, revealed how the ageing rocker attempted to use the ancient Amazonian marriage ritual while filming scenes for 1982 movie 'Fitzcarraldo'.
Julien, 53, told Radio 4's 'Film Programme,' "It involved putting bamboo over the male member and filling it with stinger bees so the member attained the size of the bamboo."Mick spent months in the jungle in Peru. He was going mad out there I think."British director Julien was with The Rolling Stones in Mexico making their 'Undercover of the Night' video.Former US supermodel Janice Dickinson, 52, humiliated Mick when she told TV chat show host Jonathan Ross "Mick has a very small penis".The singer, whose band's hits include '(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction' and 'Brown Sugar,' has fathered seven children with four different women.Mick is currently in a relationship with US fashion stylist L'Wren Scott.
BANG Showbiz
May. 22, 2007 07:26 AM
Mick Jagger reportedly tried to enlarge his penis by letting bees sting it.The Rolling Stones frontman, whose "small penis" was mocked by a former lover, covered his manhood in bees in the hope that their stings would cause it to swell.Film director Julien Temple, revealed how the ageing rocker attempted to use the ancient Amazonian marriage ritual while filming scenes for 1982 movie 'Fitzcarraldo'.
Julien, 53, told Radio 4's 'Film Programme,' "It involved putting bamboo over the male member and filling it with stinger bees so the member attained the size of the bamboo."Mick spent months in the jungle in Peru. He was going mad out there I think."British director Julien was with The Rolling Stones in Mexico making their 'Undercover of the Night' video.Former US supermodel Janice Dickinson, 52, humiliated Mick when she told TV chat show host Jonathan Ross "Mick has a very small penis".The singer, whose band's hits include '(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction' and 'Brown Sugar,' has fathered seven children with four different women.Mick is currently in a relationship with US fashion stylist L'Wren Scott.
fighting words
Peanut Envy
The latest absurdities to emerge from Jimmy Carter's big, smug mouth.
By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Monday, May 21, 2007, at 11:35 AM ET
Almost always, when former President Jimmy Carter opens his big, smug mouth, he has already made the psychological mistake that is going to reduce his words to absurdity. When he told the press last week that the Bush administration had aroused antipathy around the world, he might have been uttering no more than a banality. But no, he had to try to invest it with a special signature flourish. So, he said instead:
I think as far as the adverse impact on the nation around the world, this administration has been the worst in history. The overt reversal of America's basic values as expressed by previous administrations, including [those of] George H.W. Bush and Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon and others, has been the most disturbing to me.
Leave aside the sophomoric slackness that begins a broken-backed sentence with the words "as far as" and then cannot complete itself. "Worst in history," as the great statesman from Georgia has to know, has been the title for which he has himself been actively contending since 1976. I once had quite an argument with the late Sen. Eugene McCarthy, who maintained adamantly that it had been right for him to vote for Ronald Reagan in 1980 for no other reason. "Mr. Carter," he said, "quite simply abdicated the whole responsibility of the presidency while in office. He left the nation at the mercy of its enemies at home and abroad. He was the worst president we ever had."
I still think Richard Nixon has to be the prime candidate here, but you will notice that Jimmy Carter evinces nostalgia for that period, too. Apparently, the Christmas bombing of Vietnam, the invasion of Cambodia, the subversion of democracy in Chile, the raising of illegal slush funds, and the attempt to bug the Democratic National Committee offices were assertions of America's "basic values." Leave aside Carter's newfound admiration for Ronald Reagan, who is now undergoing a more general historical revision thanks to the work of professors Diggins and Brinkley, and just concentrate for a moment on what he says about George Bush Sr. What did he say at the time? Many people in retrospect think Bush did a good job in assembling a large multinational coalition, under U.N. auspices, for the emancipation of Kuwait from Iraqi occupation. But Jimmy Carter used his prestige, at that uneasy moment, to make an open appeal to all governments not to join that coalition. He went public to oppose the settled policy of Congress and the declared resolutions of the United Nations and to denounce his own country as the warmonger. And, after all, why not? It was he who had created the conditions for the Gulf crisis in the first place—initially by fawning on the shah of Iran and then, when that option collapsed, by encouraging Saddam Hussein to invade Iran and by "tilting" American policy to his side. If I had done such a thing, I would take very good care to be modest when discussions of Middle Eastern crises came up. But here's the thing about self-righteous, born-again demagogues: Nothing they ever do, or did, can be attributed to anything but the very highest motives.
Here is a man who, in his latest book on the Israel-Palestine crisis, has found the elusive key to the problem. The mistake of Israel, he tells us (and tells us that he told the Israeli leadership) is to have moved away from God and the prophets and toward secularism. If you ever feel like a good laugh, just tell yourself that things would improve if only the Israeli government would be more Orthodox. Jimmy Carter will then turn his vacantly pious glare on you, as if to say that you just don't understand what it is to have a personal savior.
In the Carter years, the United States was an international laughingstock. This was not just because of the prevalence of his ghastly kin: the beer-sodden brother Billy, doing deals with Libyan President Muammar Qaddafi, and the grisly matriarch, Miz Lillian. It was not just because of the president's dire lectures on morality and salvation and his weird encounters with lethal rabbits and UFOs. It was not just because of the risible White House "Bible study" sessions run by Bert Lance and his other open-palmed Elmer Gantry pals from Georgia. It was because, whether in Afghanistan, Iran, or Iraq—still the source of so many of our woes—the Carter administration could not tell a friend from an enemy. His combination of naivete and cynicism—from open-mouthed shock at Leonid Brezhnev's occupation of Afghanistan to underhanded support for Saddam in his unsleeping campaign of megalomania—had terrible consequences that are with us still. It's hardly an exaggeration to say that every administration since has had to deal with the chaotic legacy of Carter's mind-boggling cowardice and incompetence.
The quotation with which I began comes from an interview that he gave last week to the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. He also went on the British Broadcasting Corporation to make spiteful and cheap remarks on the retirement of Prime Minister Tony Blair, calling him "loyal, blind, apparently subservient." Yes, that's right, Mr. Carter. Just the way to make friends and assert "America's basic values." Show us your peanut envy. Heap insults on a guest in Washington: a thrice-elected prime minister who was the first and strongest ally of the United States on the most awful day in its recent history. A man who was prepared to risk his own career to be counted as a friend. A man who was warning against the Taliban, against Slobodan Milosevic, and against Saddam Hussein when George Bush was only the governor of Texas. Leaders like that deserve a little respect even when they are wrong—but don't expect any generosity or courtesy from the purse-mouthed preacher man from Plains, who just purely knows he was right all along, and who, when that fails, can always point to the numberless godly victories that he won over the forces of evil.
Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair and the author of God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.
Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2166661/
Copyright 2007 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
Peanut Envy
The latest absurdities to emerge from Jimmy Carter's big, smug mouth.
By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Monday, May 21, 2007, at 11:35 AM ET
Almost always, when former President Jimmy Carter opens his big, smug mouth, he has already made the psychological mistake that is going to reduce his words to absurdity. When he told the press last week that the Bush administration had aroused antipathy around the world, he might have been uttering no more than a banality. But no, he had to try to invest it with a special signature flourish. So, he said instead:
I think as far as the adverse impact on the nation around the world, this administration has been the worst in history. The overt reversal of America's basic values as expressed by previous administrations, including [those of] George H.W. Bush and Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon and others, has been the most disturbing to me.
Leave aside the sophomoric slackness that begins a broken-backed sentence with the words "as far as" and then cannot complete itself. "Worst in history," as the great statesman from Georgia has to know, has been the title for which he has himself been actively contending since 1976. I once had quite an argument with the late Sen. Eugene McCarthy, who maintained adamantly that it had been right for him to vote for Ronald Reagan in 1980 for no other reason. "Mr. Carter," he said, "quite simply abdicated the whole responsibility of the presidency while in office. He left the nation at the mercy of its enemies at home and abroad. He was the worst president we ever had."
I still think Richard Nixon has to be the prime candidate here, but you will notice that Jimmy Carter evinces nostalgia for that period, too. Apparently, the Christmas bombing of Vietnam, the invasion of Cambodia, the subversion of democracy in Chile, the raising of illegal slush funds, and the attempt to bug the Democratic National Committee offices were assertions of America's "basic values." Leave aside Carter's newfound admiration for Ronald Reagan, who is now undergoing a more general historical revision thanks to the work of professors Diggins and Brinkley, and just concentrate for a moment on what he says about George Bush Sr. What did he say at the time? Many people in retrospect think Bush did a good job in assembling a large multinational coalition, under U.N. auspices, for the emancipation of Kuwait from Iraqi occupation. But Jimmy Carter used his prestige, at that uneasy moment, to make an open appeal to all governments not to join that coalition. He went public to oppose the settled policy of Congress and the declared resolutions of the United Nations and to denounce his own country as the warmonger. And, after all, why not? It was he who had created the conditions for the Gulf crisis in the first place—initially by fawning on the shah of Iran and then, when that option collapsed, by encouraging Saddam Hussein to invade Iran and by "tilting" American policy to his side. If I had done such a thing, I would take very good care to be modest when discussions of Middle Eastern crises came up. But here's the thing about self-righteous, born-again demagogues: Nothing they ever do, or did, can be attributed to anything but the very highest motives.
Here is a man who, in his latest book on the Israel-Palestine crisis, has found the elusive key to the problem. The mistake of Israel, he tells us (and tells us that he told the Israeli leadership) is to have moved away from God and the prophets and toward secularism. If you ever feel like a good laugh, just tell yourself that things would improve if only the Israeli government would be more Orthodox. Jimmy Carter will then turn his vacantly pious glare on you, as if to say that you just don't understand what it is to have a personal savior.
In the Carter years, the United States was an international laughingstock. This was not just because of the prevalence of his ghastly kin: the beer-sodden brother Billy, doing deals with Libyan President Muammar Qaddafi, and the grisly matriarch, Miz Lillian. It was not just because of the president's dire lectures on morality and salvation and his weird encounters with lethal rabbits and UFOs. It was not just because of the risible White House "Bible study" sessions run by Bert Lance and his other open-palmed Elmer Gantry pals from Georgia. It was because, whether in Afghanistan, Iran, or Iraq—still the source of so many of our woes—the Carter administration could not tell a friend from an enemy. His combination of naivete and cynicism—from open-mouthed shock at Leonid Brezhnev's occupation of Afghanistan to underhanded support for Saddam in his unsleeping campaign of megalomania—had terrible consequences that are with us still. It's hardly an exaggeration to say that every administration since has had to deal with the chaotic legacy of Carter's mind-boggling cowardice and incompetence.
The quotation with which I began comes from an interview that he gave last week to the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. He also went on the British Broadcasting Corporation to make spiteful and cheap remarks on the retirement of Prime Minister Tony Blair, calling him "loyal, blind, apparently subservient." Yes, that's right, Mr. Carter. Just the way to make friends and assert "America's basic values." Show us your peanut envy. Heap insults on a guest in Washington: a thrice-elected prime minister who was the first and strongest ally of the United States on the most awful day in its recent history. A man who was prepared to risk his own career to be counted as a friend. A man who was warning against the Taliban, against Slobodan Milosevic, and against Saddam Hussein when George Bush was only the governor of Texas. Leaders like that deserve a little respect even when they are wrong—but don't expect any generosity or courtesy from the purse-mouthed preacher man from Plains, who just purely knows he was right all along, and who, when that fails, can always point to the numberless godly victories that he won over the forces of evil.
Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair and the author of God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.
Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2166661/
Copyright 2007 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
Monday, May 21, 2007
Iran's secret plan for summer offensive to force US out of Iraq
Simon Tisdall
Tuesday May 22, 2007
Guardian
Iran is secretly forging ties with al-Qaida elements and Sunni Arab militias in Iraq in preparation for a summer showdown with coalition forces intended to tip a wavering US Congress into voting for full military withdrawal, US officials say.
"Iran is fighting a proxy war in Iraq and it's a very dangerous course for them to be following. They are already committing daily acts of war against US and British forces," a senior US official in Baghdad warned. "They [Iran] are behind a lot of high-profile attacks meant to undermine US will and British will, such as the rocket attacks on Basra palace and the Green Zone [in Baghdad]. The attacks are directed by the Revolutionary Guard who are connected right to the top [of the Iranian government]."
The official said US commanders were bracing for a nationwide, Iranian-orchestrated summer offensive, linking al-Qaida and Sunni insurgents to Tehran's Shia militia allies, that Iran hoped would trigger a political mutiny in Washington and a US retreat. "We expect that al-Qaida and Iran will both attempt to increase the propaganda and increase the violence prior to Petraeus's report in September [when the US commander General David Petraeus will report to Congress on President George Bush's controversial, six-month security "surge" of 30,000 troop reinforcements]," the official said.
"Certainly it [the violence] is going to pick up from their side. There is significant latent capability in Iraq, especially Iranian-sponsored capability. They can turn it up whenever they want. You can see that from the pre-positioning that's been going on and the huge stockpiles of Iranian weapons that we've turned up in the last couple of months. The relationships between Iran and groups like al-Qaida are very fluid," the official said.
"It often comes down to individuals, and people constantly move around. For instance, the Sunni Arab so-called resistance groups use Salafi jihadist ideology for their own purposes. But the whole Iran- al-Qaida linkup is very sinister."
Iran has maintained close links to Iraq's Shia political parties and militias but has previously eschewed collaboration with al-Qaida and Sunni insurgents.
US officials now say they have firm evidence that Tehran has switched tack as it senses a chance of victory in Iraq. In a parallel development, they say they also have proof that Iran has reversed its previous policy in Afghanistan and is now supporting and supplying the Taliban's campaign against US, British and other Nato forces.
Tehran's strategy to discredit the US surge and foment a decisive congressional revolt against Mr Bush is national in scope and not confined to the Shia south, its traditional sphere of influence, the senior official in Baghdad said. It included stepped-up coordination with Shia militias such as Moqtada al-Sadr's Jaish al-Mahdi as well as Syrian-backed Sunni Arab groups and al-Qaida in Mesopotamia, he added. Iran was also expanding contacts across the board with paramilitary forces and political groups, including Kurdish parties such as the PUK, a US ally.
"Their strategy takes into account all these various parties. Iran is playing all these different factions to maximise its future control and maximise US and British difficulties. Their co-conspirator is Syria which is allowing the takfirists [fundamentalist Salafi jihadis] to come across the border," the official said.
Any US decision to retaliate against Iran on its own territory could be taken only at the highest political level in Washington, the official said. But he indicated that American patience was wearing thin.
Warning that the US was "absolutely determined" to hit back hard wherever it was challenged by Iranian proxies or agents inside Iraq, he cited the case of five alleged members of the Revolutionary Guard's al-Quds force detained in Irbil in January. Despite strenuous protests from Tehran, which claims the men are diplomats, they have still not been released.
"Tehran is behaving like a racecourse gambler. They're betting on all the horses in the race, even on people they fundamentally don't trust," a senior administration official in Washington said. "They don't know what the outcome will be in Iraq. So they're hedging their bets."
The administration official also claimed that notwithstanding recent US and British overtures, Syria was still collaborating closely with Iran's strategy in Iraq.
"80% to 90%" of the foreign jihadis entering Iraq were doing so from Syrian territory, he said.
Despite recent diplomatic contacts, and an agreement to hold bilateral talks at ambassadorial level in Baghdad next week, US officials say there has been no let-up in hostile Iranian activities, including continuing support for violence, weapons smuggling and training.
"Iran is perpetuating the cycle of sectarian violence through support for extra-judicial killing and murder cells. They bring Iraqi militia members and insurgent groups into Iran for training and then help infiltrate them back into the country. We have plenty of evidence from a variety of sources. There's no argument about that. That's just a fact," the senior official in Baghdad said.
In trying to force an American retreat, Iran's hardline leadership also hoped to bring about a humiliating political and diplomatic defeat for the US that would reduce Washington's regional influence while increasing Tehran's own.
But if Iran succeeded in "prematurely" driving US and British forces out of Iraq, the likely result would be a "colossal humanitarian disaster" and possible regional war drawing in the Sunni Arab Gulf states, Syria and Turkey, he said.
Despite such concerns, or because of them, the US welcomed the chance to talk to Iran, the senior administration official said. "Our agenda starts with force protection in Iraq," he said. But there were many other Iraq-related issues to be discussed. Recent pressure had shown that Iran's behaviour could be modified, the official claimed: "Last winter they were literally getting away with murder."
But tougher action by security forces in Iraq against Iranian agents and networks, the dispatch of an additional aircraft carrier group to the Gulf and UN security council resolutions imposing sanctions had given Tehran pause, he said.
Washington analysts and commentators predict that Gen Petraeus's report to the White House and Congress in early September will be a pivotal moment in the history of the four-and-a-half-year war - and a decision to begin a troop drawdown or continue with the surge policy will hinge on the outcome. Most Democrats and many Republicans in Congress believe Iraq is in the grip of a civil war and that there is little that a continuing military presence can achieve. "Political will has already failed. It's over," a former Bush administration official said.
A senior adviser to Gen Petraeus reported this month that the surge had reduced violence, especially sectarian killings, in the Baghdad area and Sunni-dominated Anbar province. But the adviser admitted that much of the trouble had merely moved elsewhere, "resulting in spikes of activity in Diyala [to the north] and some areas to the south of the capital". "Overall violence is at about the same level [as when the surge began in February]."
Iranian officials flatly deny US and British allegations of involvement in internal violence in Iraq or in attacks on coalition forces. Interviewed in Tehran recently, Mohammad Reza Bagheri, deputy foreign minister for Arab affairs with primary responsibility for Iran's policy in Iraq, said: "We believe it would be to the benefit of both the occupiers and the Iraqi people that they [the coalition forces] withdraw immediately."
Simon Tisdall
Tuesday May 22, 2007
Guardian
Iran is secretly forging ties with al-Qaida elements and Sunni Arab militias in Iraq in preparation for a summer showdown with coalition forces intended to tip a wavering US Congress into voting for full military withdrawal, US officials say.
"Iran is fighting a proxy war in Iraq and it's a very dangerous course for them to be following. They are already committing daily acts of war against US and British forces," a senior US official in Baghdad warned. "They [Iran] are behind a lot of high-profile attacks meant to undermine US will and British will, such as the rocket attacks on Basra palace and the Green Zone [in Baghdad]. The attacks are directed by the Revolutionary Guard who are connected right to the top [of the Iranian government]."
The official said US commanders were bracing for a nationwide, Iranian-orchestrated summer offensive, linking al-Qaida and Sunni insurgents to Tehran's Shia militia allies, that Iran hoped would trigger a political mutiny in Washington and a US retreat. "We expect that al-Qaida and Iran will both attempt to increase the propaganda and increase the violence prior to Petraeus's report in September [when the US commander General David Petraeus will report to Congress on President George Bush's controversial, six-month security "surge" of 30,000 troop reinforcements]," the official said.
"Certainly it [the violence] is going to pick up from their side. There is significant latent capability in Iraq, especially Iranian-sponsored capability. They can turn it up whenever they want. You can see that from the pre-positioning that's been going on and the huge stockpiles of Iranian weapons that we've turned up in the last couple of months. The relationships between Iran and groups like al-Qaida are very fluid," the official said.
"It often comes down to individuals, and people constantly move around. For instance, the Sunni Arab so-called resistance groups use Salafi jihadist ideology for their own purposes. But the whole Iran- al-Qaida linkup is very sinister."
Iran has maintained close links to Iraq's Shia political parties and militias but has previously eschewed collaboration with al-Qaida and Sunni insurgents.
US officials now say they have firm evidence that Tehran has switched tack as it senses a chance of victory in Iraq. In a parallel development, they say they also have proof that Iran has reversed its previous policy in Afghanistan and is now supporting and supplying the Taliban's campaign against US, British and other Nato forces.
Tehran's strategy to discredit the US surge and foment a decisive congressional revolt against Mr Bush is national in scope and not confined to the Shia south, its traditional sphere of influence, the senior official in Baghdad said. It included stepped-up coordination with Shia militias such as Moqtada al-Sadr's Jaish al-Mahdi as well as Syrian-backed Sunni Arab groups and al-Qaida in Mesopotamia, he added. Iran was also expanding contacts across the board with paramilitary forces and political groups, including Kurdish parties such as the PUK, a US ally.
"Their strategy takes into account all these various parties. Iran is playing all these different factions to maximise its future control and maximise US and British difficulties. Their co-conspirator is Syria which is allowing the takfirists [fundamentalist Salafi jihadis] to come across the border," the official said.
Any US decision to retaliate against Iran on its own territory could be taken only at the highest political level in Washington, the official said. But he indicated that American patience was wearing thin.
Warning that the US was "absolutely determined" to hit back hard wherever it was challenged by Iranian proxies or agents inside Iraq, he cited the case of five alleged members of the Revolutionary Guard's al-Quds force detained in Irbil in January. Despite strenuous protests from Tehran, which claims the men are diplomats, they have still not been released.
"Tehran is behaving like a racecourse gambler. They're betting on all the horses in the race, even on people they fundamentally don't trust," a senior administration official in Washington said. "They don't know what the outcome will be in Iraq. So they're hedging their bets."
The administration official also claimed that notwithstanding recent US and British overtures, Syria was still collaborating closely with Iran's strategy in Iraq.
"80% to 90%" of the foreign jihadis entering Iraq were doing so from Syrian territory, he said.
Despite recent diplomatic contacts, and an agreement to hold bilateral talks at ambassadorial level in Baghdad next week, US officials say there has been no let-up in hostile Iranian activities, including continuing support for violence, weapons smuggling and training.
"Iran is perpetuating the cycle of sectarian violence through support for extra-judicial killing and murder cells. They bring Iraqi militia members and insurgent groups into Iran for training and then help infiltrate them back into the country. We have plenty of evidence from a variety of sources. There's no argument about that. That's just a fact," the senior official in Baghdad said.
In trying to force an American retreat, Iran's hardline leadership also hoped to bring about a humiliating political and diplomatic defeat for the US that would reduce Washington's regional influence while increasing Tehran's own.
But if Iran succeeded in "prematurely" driving US and British forces out of Iraq, the likely result would be a "colossal humanitarian disaster" and possible regional war drawing in the Sunni Arab Gulf states, Syria and Turkey, he said.
Despite such concerns, or because of them, the US welcomed the chance to talk to Iran, the senior administration official said. "Our agenda starts with force protection in Iraq," he said. But there were many other Iraq-related issues to be discussed. Recent pressure had shown that Iran's behaviour could be modified, the official claimed: "Last winter they were literally getting away with murder."
But tougher action by security forces in Iraq against Iranian agents and networks, the dispatch of an additional aircraft carrier group to the Gulf and UN security council resolutions imposing sanctions had given Tehran pause, he said.
Washington analysts and commentators predict that Gen Petraeus's report to the White House and Congress in early September will be a pivotal moment in the history of the four-and-a-half-year war - and a decision to begin a troop drawdown or continue with the surge policy will hinge on the outcome. Most Democrats and many Republicans in Congress believe Iraq is in the grip of a civil war and that there is little that a continuing military presence can achieve. "Political will has already failed. It's over," a former Bush administration official said.
A senior adviser to Gen Petraeus reported this month that the surge had reduced violence, especially sectarian killings, in the Baghdad area and Sunni-dominated Anbar province. But the adviser admitted that much of the trouble had merely moved elsewhere, "resulting in spikes of activity in Diyala [to the north] and some areas to the south of the capital". "Overall violence is at about the same level [as when the surge began in February]."
Iranian officials flatly deny US and British allegations of involvement in internal violence in Iraq or in attacks on coalition forces. Interviewed in Tehran recently, Mohammad Reza Bagheri, deputy foreign minister for Arab affairs with primary responsibility for Iran's policy in Iraq, said: "We believe it would be to the benefit of both the occupiers and the Iraqi people that they [the coalition forces] withdraw immediately."
Friday, May 18, 2007
A short list of largely unknown facts about Chuck Liddell:
He was in the chess club.
He has never broken his nose.
He was an A student in high school.
He has a degree in accounting.
He has a Chihuahua named Bean.
He has seen "Fight Club."
It was "fine."
He has also seen "The Sound of Music."
He loved it. So much so that he went to see the musical -- a couple of times.
He has never broken his nose.
He was an A student in high school.
He has a degree in accounting.
He has a Chihuahua named Bean.
He has seen "Fight Club."
It was "fine."
He has also seen "The Sound of Music."
He loved it. So much so that he went to see the musical -- a couple of times.
www.deadspin.com
So, yeah, this Floyd Landis business. Heavens.
To get you up to speed, before he was scheduled to testify against Landis in his suspension hearing, former Tour de France champion Greg LeMond -- a longtime anti-doping advocate -- claimed that a friend of Landis called and threatened him the night before. What was the threat about?
Well, it appears in an earlier time, Landis and LeMond were such good buddies that they shared deep secrets. Landis confessed to LeMond that, well, he'd kind of cheated by blood doping. And LeMond shared with Landis that he had been sexually abused by an uncle as a child. Landis, being a good Mennonite, decided to use this information against Lemond, having the friend call him and claim they would give up the information that "LeMond's uncle and they would play 'hide the weenie.'" This is really what the friend said. (He even admitted it later in the day.)
LeMond decided to go public with his "secret" anyway, testifying against Landis, burying him in the process. (Justifiably, if you ask us.) And a cycling trial turned into daytime television. "Hide the weenie." Jesus.
To get you up to speed, before he was scheduled to testify against Landis in his suspension hearing, former Tour de France champion Greg LeMond -- a longtime anti-doping advocate -- claimed that a friend of Landis called and threatened him the night before. What was the threat about?
Well, it appears in an earlier time, Landis and LeMond were such good buddies that they shared deep secrets. Landis confessed to LeMond that, well, he'd kind of cheated by blood doping. And LeMond shared with Landis that he had been sexually abused by an uncle as a child. Landis, being a good Mennonite, decided to use this information against Lemond, having the friend call him and claim they would give up the information that "LeMond's uncle and they would play 'hide the weenie.'" This is really what the friend said. (He even admitted it later in the day.)
LeMond decided to go public with his "secret" anyway, testifying against Landis, burying him in the process. (Justifiably, if you ask us.) And a cycling trial turned into daytime television. "Hide the weenie." Jesus.
Thursday, May 17, 2007
Bolton!
This is like a delicious piece of candy.
"It is not often one whoops with joy listening to the BBC Radio 4 Today programme, but Jon Humphrys interviewing John Bolton, former US ambassador to the UN, this morning was a sheer delight. (You can listen to the piece here.)
From Humphrys we got the usual BBC droning, with forthright responses from Bolton. Eventually though, after a run of sneering negativity over Iraq, Bolton had had enough. What did it was the suggestion that the US was "a busted flush", Humphrys calling in aid George Soros."Are you kidding me!", responded Bolton. "This is a man of the extreme left. I am sure you will find a great deal in common with him, as would many others on the continent."A sniffy Humphrys was not going to take that lying down though. On the attack, he demanded: "Do you make the assumption then that because one asks questions – perfectly valid questions about the conduct of American policy - one is on the extreme left?"Bolton was unfazed: "I can see it from the content of your questions and the perspective from which you're coming and from the direction that your questions are taking. If you tell me you're a conservative, I would be happy to accept it."That really got Humphrys going: "I would tell you that I'm neither conservative, nor left wing not right wing, nor middle wing, because…" A laughing Bolton took that in his stride: "You have no views at all. Your brain is empty, you have no views at all…"Attempting to muster all his majesty, Humphrys was almost squeaking in indignation: "I have an awful lot of views, Ambassador, a view for every subject under the sun but I don't express them during the course of my interviews. I ask questions… That's what interviewing is about... You'll have heard of a thing called devil's advocate… Maybe they don't do it like that in the United States, but…""I know, you're a superior Brit as well!" rejoins Bolton. You can see why he really pissed them off at the UN."
"It is not often one whoops with joy listening to the BBC Radio 4 Today programme, but Jon Humphrys interviewing John Bolton, former US ambassador to the UN, this morning was a sheer delight. (You can listen to the piece here.)
From Humphrys we got the usual BBC droning, with forthright responses from Bolton. Eventually though, after a run of sneering negativity over Iraq, Bolton had had enough. What did it was the suggestion that the US was "a busted flush", Humphrys calling in aid George Soros."Are you kidding me!", responded Bolton. "This is a man of the extreme left. I am sure you will find a great deal in common with him, as would many others on the continent."A sniffy Humphrys was not going to take that lying down though. On the attack, he demanded: "Do you make the assumption then that because one asks questions – perfectly valid questions about the conduct of American policy - one is on the extreme left?"Bolton was unfazed: "I can see it from the content of your questions and the perspective from which you're coming and from the direction that your questions are taking. If you tell me you're a conservative, I would be happy to accept it."That really got Humphrys going: "I would tell you that I'm neither conservative, nor left wing not right wing, nor middle wing, because…" A laughing Bolton took that in his stride: "You have no views at all. Your brain is empty, you have no views at all…"Attempting to muster all his majesty, Humphrys was almost squeaking in indignation: "I have an awful lot of views, Ambassador, a view for every subject under the sun but I don't express them during the course of my interviews. I ask questions… That's what interviewing is about... You'll have heard of a thing called devil's advocate… Maybe they don't do it like that in the United States, but…""I know, you're a superior Brit as well!" rejoins Bolton. You can see why he really pissed them off at the UN."
Wednesday, May 16, 2007
Tuesday, May 15, 2007
Bush higher than Congress!
Congress Approval Down to 29%; Bush Approval Steady at 33%
Both ratings are slightly lower than 2007 averages
by Joseph Carroll
GALLUP NEWS SERVICE
PRINCETON, NJ -- A new Gallup Poll finds continued low levels of public support for both Congress and President George W. Bush. Twenty-nine percent of Americans approve of Congress, down slightly from last month's reading (33%) and this year's high point of 37%, while Bush's approval rating is holding steady at 33%. Both the ratings of Congress and the president are slightly lower than their respective 2007 averages. Approval ratings of Congress are higher among Democrats than Republicans, while Bush's ratings are much higher among Republicans.
Both ratings are slightly lower than 2007 averages
by Joseph Carroll
GALLUP NEWS SERVICE
PRINCETON, NJ -- A new Gallup Poll finds continued low levels of public support for both Congress and President George W. Bush. Twenty-nine percent of Americans approve of Congress, down slightly from last month's reading (33%) and this year's high point of 37%, while Bush's approval rating is holding steady at 33%. Both the ratings of Congress and the president are slightly lower than their respective 2007 averages. Approval ratings of Congress are higher among Democrats than Republicans, while Bush's ratings are much higher among Republicans.
Getting ready for work in the monrnings I often watch Magnum P.I. on channel 9 and toggle between that and the news. This morning I watched the second show in a "to be continued" from yesterday and suspected it was the last episode. I was right! I didn't realize Magnum re-upped in the Navy. What a stud. I also read that they are shooting a movie based on the series.
http://magnum-mania.com/Episodes/Episodes.html
http://magnum-mania.com/Episodes/Episodes.html
Friday, May 11, 2007
I’d like to see mainstream media take one tenth of the energy and resources they’ve spent investigating US secret programs and put it into investigating where people like the Fort Dix Six learned and hardened the Islamic rationale for their plans. The New York Times has told us that the mosque they attended was a “moderate” mosque, and that’s as far as it’s going to get.
If the Times is right and they didn’t learn it at the mosque ... then where? It’s a bit hard to believe that their indoctrination came entirely from the internet.
But US media are satisfied to let this remain a mystery.
The philosophy of jihad is the subject of VDH’s column for today: Al Qaedism, Again.
Why would Albanian-speaking Muslim refugees from the Balkans try to murder American soldiers? After all, the United States — not bin Laden’s rag-tag jihadists — saved Bosnia and Kosovo? And we did that by bombing the capital of a Christian European nation.
But then, why did a mixed-up Albanian Muslim in Salt Lake City, one Sulejman Talovic, go on a shopping-mall shooting spree? Five innocents were killed in the attack before the murderer himself was shot and killed.
And why, after pouring billions of dollars into Afghanistan, did poor, mixed-up Omeed Aziz Popal, an Afghan Muslim, try to run over several innocents in San Francisco near a Jewish center in September 2006?
Or, for that matter, why did an angry Muslim Pakistani gun down Jews in Seattle?
Or, again, why earlier last year, did a 22-year-old Iranian-American Muslim drive his sport utility vehicle into a crowded pedestrian zone at the University of North Carolina?
If the Times is right and they didn’t learn it at the mosque ... then where? It’s a bit hard to believe that their indoctrination came entirely from the internet.
But US media are satisfied to let this remain a mystery.
The philosophy of jihad is the subject of VDH’s column for today: Al Qaedism, Again.
Why would Albanian-speaking Muslim refugees from the Balkans try to murder American soldiers? After all, the United States — not bin Laden’s rag-tag jihadists — saved Bosnia and Kosovo? And we did that by bombing the capital of a Christian European nation.
But then, why did a mixed-up Albanian Muslim in Salt Lake City, one Sulejman Talovic, go on a shopping-mall shooting spree? Five innocents were killed in the attack before the murderer himself was shot and killed.
And why, after pouring billions of dollars into Afghanistan, did poor, mixed-up Omeed Aziz Popal, an Afghan Muslim, try to run over several innocents in San Francisco near a Jewish center in September 2006?
Or, for that matter, why did an angry Muslim Pakistani gun down Jews in Seattle?
Or, again, why earlier last year, did a 22-year-old Iranian-American Muslim drive his sport utility vehicle into a crowded pedestrian zone at the University of North Carolina?
Christopher Hitchens on returning to his old neighborhood of Finsbury Park: Londonistan Calling. "It’s impossible to exaggerate how far and how fast this situation has deteriorated. Even at the time of the Satanic Verses affair, as long ago as 1989, Muslim demonstrations may have demanded Rushdie’s death, but they did so, if you like, peacefully. And they confined their lurid rhetorical attacks to Muslims who had become apostate. But at least since the time of the Danish-cartoon furor, threats have been made against non-Muslims as well as ex-Muslims (see photograph), the killing of Shiite Muslim heretics has been applauded and justified, and the general resort to indiscriminate violence has been rationalized in the name of god. Traditional Islamic law says that Muslims who live in non-Muslim societies must obey the law of the majority. But this does not restrain those who now believe that they can proselytize Islam by force, and need not obey kuffar law in the meantime. I find myself haunted by a challenge that was offered on the BBC by a Muslim activist named Anjem Choudary: a man who has praised the 9/11 murders as “magnificent” and proclaimed that “Britain belongs to Allah.” When asked if he might prefer to move to a country which practices Shari’a, he replied: “Who says you own Britain anyway?” A question that will have to be answered one way or another."
Thursday, May 10, 2007
Civics Bitch!
The Coercion Herring
By Arnold Kling : 10 May 2007
"What is really at stake in the argument over the moral foundations of the market, and therefore minimum wage laws, is what rights people have, how much weight they have, and what the proper aims of government are. It is at best misleading to disguise discussion about these issues as a debate about the proper understanding of the notion of coercion." -- Liam Murphy
For libertarians, one moral trump card against government is that government action is coercive. In the private sector, individuals deal with one with one another voluntarily. When you deal with government, ultimately government holds a gun to your head.
I disagree with libertarians on this point. I believe that there are significant differences between government action and private contracts, but I believe that it is incorrect to say that a key difference is that government is backed by force and private contracts are not.
Even in a libertarian society, contracts must be enforced and disputes must be resolved. Ultimately, government will have a Golden Scepter with which to settle disputes.
Below, I will use a few examples to illustrate the point that coercion is implicit in private-sector behavior. Then, I will articulate in a different way the moral intution that government power is more dangerous to freedom than private contracting.
The Rude Smoker
Suppose that in community Libertopia, in response to customer preferences, all of the better restaurants ban smoking. In nearby community Paternafascista, there is a law that bans smoking in restaurants.
Consider a rude smoker who decides to go to one of the better restaurants and light up. In Paternafascista, if the smoker is really obstinate about smoking in the restaurant, he may be forcibly removed from the restaurant by the police.
In Libertopia, smoking is banned by policy rather than by law. Suppose that the rude smoker goes into one of the better restaurants and lights up. The owner of the restaurant comes over and points to the no-smoking policy. The smoker says, "I don't care. I have every right to smoke." The restaurant owner insists that the restaurant is his property. Furthermore, by coming to the restaurant, customers have implicitly agreed not to smoke. The smoker says that he never agreed to any such thing. The restaurant owner calls for his bouncer. The smoker calls for his bodyguard. Fearing violence, the restaurant owner calls the police, who forcibly remove the smoker from the restaurant.
In both Libertopia and Paterfascista, smokers are not able to smoke in the better restaurants. If someone insists on trying to smoke, he may end up forcibly removed by the police.
The Jim Crow Bus Company
In Libertopia, the Jim Crow Bus Company has a "whites-only" policy for the front half of the bus. If non-whites try to sit in the front half of the bus, the bus driver will make them move. If they refuse, the bus driver will call the police, who will enforce the property rights of the bus company.
In Paternafascista, there is a law that says that non-whites must sit in the back of the bus. If they refuse, the bus driver will call the police, who will enforce the law.
To non-whites boarding a Jim Crow bus, Libertopia and Paternafascista look the same. If they try to sit near the front of a bus operated by Jim Crow, ultimately they may be forcibly removed from the bus by the police.
The Minimum Wage Pledge
In Libertopia, a landlord believes strongly in the minimum wage. Before he will rent to you, he makes you sign a pledge saying that you will not accept a job below the minimum wage. If you violate that pledge, he will evict you. If you do not comply with your eviction, he will call the police.
In Paternafascista, there is a minimum wage law. If you accept a job below the minimum wage, and the government finds out about it, your employer will be punished by the government.
In either community, you will not be able to work below the minimum wage and stay in your apartment. In either community, government will be the ultimate enforcer. (I admit, though, that I had to stretch pretty hard to come up with a way to enact the minimum wage privately.)
The Real Case for Limited Government
In my view, the reason that government laws are more offensive than private agreements is that the jurisdiction of private individuals is limited. A restaurant owner may only enforce a smoking ban for his restaurant. If a competing restaurant wants to allow smoking, it can. A private bus company can only have a racist seating policy on its buses. A competing bus companies can offer open seating to all races. A minimum-wage advocating landlord can only reject tenants for his property. A competing landlord could choose to rent to tenants who accept jobs below the minimum wage.
When two business firms sign a contract, one of the stipulations of the contract may be that any dispute will be settled according to the laws and courts of a particular state. The two companies bind themselves to accepting a particular jurisdiction.
When I choose to live in a particular community, I obligate myself to obey the laws of that community. The fact that I do not like many of those laws is the price that I pay for living in that community.
The wider the jurisdiction of the community, and the greater the intrusiveness of its laws, the more costly it is for individuals to find a set of laws that suits them. I live in a county with many political policies that I find objectionable, because the cost of moving to a more politically congenial location is high.
Government policies take away more liberty than equivalent private policies. The reason is not that government policies are backed by physical force. The reason is that government has broader jurisdiction. With private policies, when I am adversely affected by a policy, I can choose an alternative service provider at relatively low cost. With government, because its jurisdiction is so extensive, the cost to me of escaping adverse policies is much higher. It is not the armed force that makes government feel more like tyranny. It is the absence of competition.
Limited government is a legitimate moral ideal. However, as a libertarian, do not be so quick to claim that government's uniqueness is its ability to achieve compliance using physical force. Non-libertarians are likely to respond to this dogma with a look of incomprehension. And they are right.
The difference between government laws and private agreements is not that only the former are ultimately backed by force. The difference is that the cost of finding an alternative government jurisdiction is typically much higher than the cost of finding another private party to a contract.
Arnold Kling is author of Learning Economics and Crisis of Abundance.
By Arnold Kling : 10 May 2007
"What is really at stake in the argument over the moral foundations of the market, and therefore minimum wage laws, is what rights people have, how much weight they have, and what the proper aims of government are. It is at best misleading to disguise discussion about these issues as a debate about the proper understanding of the notion of coercion." -- Liam Murphy
For libertarians, one moral trump card against government is that government action is coercive. In the private sector, individuals deal with one with one another voluntarily. When you deal with government, ultimately government holds a gun to your head.
I disagree with libertarians on this point. I believe that there are significant differences between government action and private contracts, but I believe that it is incorrect to say that a key difference is that government is backed by force and private contracts are not.
Even in a libertarian society, contracts must be enforced and disputes must be resolved. Ultimately, government will have a Golden Scepter with which to settle disputes.
Below, I will use a few examples to illustrate the point that coercion is implicit in private-sector behavior. Then, I will articulate in a different way the moral intution that government power is more dangerous to freedom than private contracting.
The Rude Smoker
Suppose that in community Libertopia, in response to customer preferences, all of the better restaurants ban smoking. In nearby community Paternafascista, there is a law that bans smoking in restaurants.
Consider a rude smoker who decides to go to one of the better restaurants and light up. In Paternafascista, if the smoker is really obstinate about smoking in the restaurant, he may be forcibly removed from the restaurant by the police.
In Libertopia, smoking is banned by policy rather than by law. Suppose that the rude smoker goes into one of the better restaurants and lights up. The owner of the restaurant comes over and points to the no-smoking policy. The smoker says, "I don't care. I have every right to smoke." The restaurant owner insists that the restaurant is his property. Furthermore, by coming to the restaurant, customers have implicitly agreed not to smoke. The smoker says that he never agreed to any such thing. The restaurant owner calls for his bouncer. The smoker calls for his bodyguard. Fearing violence, the restaurant owner calls the police, who forcibly remove the smoker from the restaurant.
In both Libertopia and Paterfascista, smokers are not able to smoke in the better restaurants. If someone insists on trying to smoke, he may end up forcibly removed by the police.
The Jim Crow Bus Company
In Libertopia, the Jim Crow Bus Company has a "whites-only" policy for the front half of the bus. If non-whites try to sit in the front half of the bus, the bus driver will make them move. If they refuse, the bus driver will call the police, who will enforce the property rights of the bus company.
In Paternafascista, there is a law that says that non-whites must sit in the back of the bus. If they refuse, the bus driver will call the police, who will enforce the law.
To non-whites boarding a Jim Crow bus, Libertopia and Paternafascista look the same. If they try to sit near the front of a bus operated by Jim Crow, ultimately they may be forcibly removed from the bus by the police.
The Minimum Wage Pledge
In Libertopia, a landlord believes strongly in the minimum wage. Before he will rent to you, he makes you sign a pledge saying that you will not accept a job below the minimum wage. If you violate that pledge, he will evict you. If you do not comply with your eviction, he will call the police.
In Paternafascista, there is a minimum wage law. If you accept a job below the minimum wage, and the government finds out about it, your employer will be punished by the government.
In either community, you will not be able to work below the minimum wage and stay in your apartment. In either community, government will be the ultimate enforcer. (I admit, though, that I had to stretch pretty hard to come up with a way to enact the minimum wage privately.)
The Real Case for Limited Government
In my view, the reason that government laws are more offensive than private agreements is that the jurisdiction of private individuals is limited. A restaurant owner may only enforce a smoking ban for his restaurant. If a competing restaurant wants to allow smoking, it can. A private bus company can only have a racist seating policy on its buses. A competing bus companies can offer open seating to all races. A minimum-wage advocating landlord can only reject tenants for his property. A competing landlord could choose to rent to tenants who accept jobs below the minimum wage.
When two business firms sign a contract, one of the stipulations of the contract may be that any dispute will be settled according to the laws and courts of a particular state. The two companies bind themselves to accepting a particular jurisdiction.
When I choose to live in a particular community, I obligate myself to obey the laws of that community. The fact that I do not like many of those laws is the price that I pay for living in that community.
The wider the jurisdiction of the community, and the greater the intrusiveness of its laws, the more costly it is for individuals to find a set of laws that suits them. I live in a county with many political policies that I find objectionable, because the cost of moving to a more politically congenial location is high.
Government policies take away more liberty than equivalent private policies. The reason is not that government policies are backed by physical force. The reason is that government has broader jurisdiction. With private policies, when I am adversely affected by a policy, I can choose an alternative service provider at relatively low cost. With government, because its jurisdiction is so extensive, the cost to me of escaping adverse policies is much higher. It is not the armed force that makes government feel more like tyranny. It is the absence of competition.
Limited government is a legitimate moral ideal. However, as a libertarian, do not be so quick to claim that government's uniqueness is its ability to achieve compliance using physical force. Non-libertarians are likely to respond to this dogma with a look of incomprehension. And they are right.
The difference between government laws and private agreements is not that only the former are ultimately backed by force. The difference is that the cost of finding an alternative government jurisdiction is typically much higher than the cost of finding another private party to a contract.
Arnold Kling is author of Learning Economics and Crisis of Abundance.
Your war, not mine!
By Victor Davis Hanson
Thursday, May 10, 2007
"This war is lost," Sen. Majority Leader Harry Reid recently proclaimed.
That pessimism about Iraq is now widely shared by his Democratic colleagues. But many of these converted doves aren't being quite honest about why they've radically changed their views of the war. Most of the serious Democratic presidential candidates -- Sens. Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden and Christopher Dodd, and former Sen. Jonathan Edwards -- once voted, along with Reid, to authorize the war. Sen. Barack Obama didn't. But, then, he wasn't in the Senate at the time.
Now these former supporters of Iraq find themselves under assault by a Democratic base that demands apologies. Only Edwards has said he is sorry for his vote of support.
But if the Democratic Party is now almost uniformly anti-war, it is also understandable why it can't field a single major presidential candidate who was in Congress when it counted and tried to stop the invasion.
After all, responsible Democrats in national office had been convinced by Bill Clinton for eight years and then George W. Bush for two that Saddam's Iraq was both a conventional and terrorist threat to the United States and its regional allies.
Most in Congress accepted that Saddam was a genocidal mass murderer. They knew he used his petrodollars to acquire dangerous weapons. And they felt his savagery was intolerable in a post-9/11 world. There was no debate that Saddam gave money to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers or offered sanctuary to terrorists like Abu Abbas and Abu Nidal. And few Democrats questioned whether the al-Qaida-affiliated terrorist group Ansar al-Islam was in Kurdistan.
In other words, Democrats, like most others, wanted Saddam taken out for a variety of reasons beyond fears of WMD. Moreover, it was the Clinton-appointed CIA director George Tenet who supplied both Democrats and Republicans in Congress with much of the intelligence they would later cite in deciding to attack Saddam.
When both congressional Democrats and Republicans cast their votes to go along with President Bush, they even crafted 23 formal causes for war. So far only the writ concerning the fear of stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction has in hindsight proven false.
But we no longer hear much about these various reasons why the Democrats understandably supported the removal of Saddam Hussein. Instead, they now most often plead they were hoodwinked by sneaky warmongering neocons or sexed-up partisan intelligence reports.
There is nothing wrong with changing your mind, especially in matters as serious as war -- but the public at least deserves a sincere explanation for this radical about-face.
So why not come clean about their changes of heart?
Many Democrats apparently think that claiming they were victimized by Bush and the neocons is more palatable than confessing to their own demoralization with the news from the front.
Others may fear that admitting publicly that a disheartened America should not or cannot finish a conflict would send a dangerous message to our enemies. So while these Democrats accuse President Bush of being hardheaded and unwavering on Iraq, they are still afraid that their own mea culpas would send an equally dangerous message of inconsistency abroad.
Democrats need to admit the truth: that removing a dangerous Saddam Hussein and promoting democracy in his place seemed a good idea to them in 2003-4 when the cost appeared tolerable. Now, in 2007, with over 3,000 American lives lost in Iraq, they feel differently.
In other words, Democrats could argue that somewhere along the line -- whether it was after Fallujah or the start of sectarian Sunni-Shiite violence -- they either lost confidence in the United States' very ability to stabilize Iraq, or felt that even if we could, it was no longer worth the tab in American blood and treasure.
That confession could, of course, be nuanced with exculpatory arguments about the mistakes made by those in the Bush administration, such as: "Our necessary war that I voted for to remove Saddam worked; your optional one to stay on to promote democracy didn't."
Such an explanation of turnabout would be transparent and invite a public discussion. And it would certainly be more legitimate that the current protestations of "the neo-cons made me do it."
With America still engaged in a tough war, that kind of excuse-making just doesn't cut it.
Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and author, most recently, of "A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War."
By Victor Davis Hanson
Thursday, May 10, 2007
"This war is lost," Sen. Majority Leader Harry Reid recently proclaimed.
That pessimism about Iraq is now widely shared by his Democratic colleagues. But many of these converted doves aren't being quite honest about why they've radically changed their views of the war. Most of the serious Democratic presidential candidates -- Sens. Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden and Christopher Dodd, and former Sen. Jonathan Edwards -- once voted, along with Reid, to authorize the war. Sen. Barack Obama didn't. But, then, he wasn't in the Senate at the time.
Now these former supporters of Iraq find themselves under assault by a Democratic base that demands apologies. Only Edwards has said he is sorry for his vote of support.
But if the Democratic Party is now almost uniformly anti-war, it is also understandable why it can't field a single major presidential candidate who was in Congress when it counted and tried to stop the invasion.
After all, responsible Democrats in national office had been convinced by Bill Clinton for eight years and then George W. Bush for two that Saddam's Iraq was both a conventional and terrorist threat to the United States and its regional allies.
Most in Congress accepted that Saddam was a genocidal mass murderer. They knew he used his petrodollars to acquire dangerous weapons. And they felt his savagery was intolerable in a post-9/11 world. There was no debate that Saddam gave money to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers or offered sanctuary to terrorists like Abu Abbas and Abu Nidal. And few Democrats questioned whether the al-Qaida-affiliated terrorist group Ansar al-Islam was in Kurdistan.
In other words, Democrats, like most others, wanted Saddam taken out for a variety of reasons beyond fears of WMD. Moreover, it was the Clinton-appointed CIA director George Tenet who supplied both Democrats and Republicans in Congress with much of the intelligence they would later cite in deciding to attack Saddam.
When both congressional Democrats and Republicans cast their votes to go along with President Bush, they even crafted 23 formal causes for war. So far only the writ concerning the fear of stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction has in hindsight proven false.
But we no longer hear much about these various reasons why the Democrats understandably supported the removal of Saddam Hussein. Instead, they now most often plead they were hoodwinked by sneaky warmongering neocons or sexed-up partisan intelligence reports.
There is nothing wrong with changing your mind, especially in matters as serious as war -- but the public at least deserves a sincere explanation for this radical about-face.
So why not come clean about their changes of heart?
Many Democrats apparently think that claiming they were victimized by Bush and the neocons is more palatable than confessing to their own demoralization with the news from the front.
Others may fear that admitting publicly that a disheartened America should not or cannot finish a conflict would send a dangerous message to our enemies. So while these Democrats accuse President Bush of being hardheaded and unwavering on Iraq, they are still afraid that their own mea culpas would send an equally dangerous message of inconsistency abroad.
Democrats need to admit the truth: that removing a dangerous Saddam Hussein and promoting democracy in his place seemed a good idea to them in 2003-4 when the cost appeared tolerable. Now, in 2007, with over 3,000 American lives lost in Iraq, they feel differently.
In other words, Democrats could argue that somewhere along the line -- whether it was after Fallujah or the start of sectarian Sunni-Shiite violence -- they either lost confidence in the United States' very ability to stabilize Iraq, or felt that even if we could, it was no longer worth the tab in American blood and treasure.
That confession could, of course, be nuanced with exculpatory arguments about the mistakes made by those in the Bush administration, such as: "Our necessary war that I voted for to remove Saddam worked; your optional one to stay on to promote democracy didn't."
Such an explanation of turnabout would be transparent and invite a public discussion. And it would certainly be more legitimate that the current protestations of "the neo-cons made me do it."
With America still engaged in a tough war, that kind of excuse-making just doesn't cut it.
Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and author, most recently, of "A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War."
Wednesday, May 09, 2007
Scorpio
A Rare Masterpiece For The Spy Genre., February 25, 2000
Reviewer:
Gus Mauro "coolbrezze" (Brandon,mb) - See all my reviews
Burt Lancaster plays an aging CIA agent who's finally had enough of the spy life and wants to quit the business so he can spend more time with his family. But his trecherous Bosses don't want him to quit so they assign Alain Delon A.K.A SCORPIO to eliimate him. Fantastic script Delon's performance in the film is one of his best even if his english is sometimes off a bit. the highlight of the film is the chase sequence between Lancaster & Delon throughout the Streets and Alleyways Of Venice. It's a captivating spy film done with the right amount of action and suspense. Most Of Today's spy films don't even come to this masterpiece. And even if they could they would still fail. This film was a true gem for it's time and cannot and will not ever be replaced or duplicated. Comment Was this review helpful to you?
Reviewer:
Gus Mauro "coolbrezze" (Brandon,mb) - See all my reviews
Burt Lancaster plays an aging CIA agent who's finally had enough of the spy life and wants to quit the business so he can spend more time with his family. But his trecherous Bosses don't want him to quit so they assign Alain Delon A.K.A SCORPIO to eliimate him. Fantastic script Delon's performance in the film is one of his best even if his english is sometimes off a bit. the highlight of the film is the chase sequence between Lancaster & Delon throughout the Streets and Alleyways Of Venice. It's a captivating spy film done with the right amount of action and suspense. Most Of Today's spy films don't even come to this masterpiece. And even if they could they would still fail. This film was a true gem for it's time and cannot and will not ever be replaced or duplicated. Comment Was this review helpful to you?
Tuesday, May 08, 2007
Sarkozy
In a photo-packed post at democracy-focused Publius Pundit, A.M. Mora y Leon is gleeful at the victory and surprised pundits had France pegged wrong. "Whodathunk? … Wasn't France solidly socialist to the bone? Weren't there a lot of analyses out saying that the French abhorred change, couldn't lift itself from its cafes, hated globalization and definitely didn't want a wild man like Sarkozy as president out wrecking the country? It's just amazing how mistaken so many observers were. There's a whole different country out there that none of them, neither enemy nor familiar, really seemed to know."
At Captain's Quarters, conservative Ed Morrissey asserts that French fatigue with rioting in the banlieus contributed to Sarkozy's success: "Of course, part of the reason Sarkozy won … is because of the continuous violence occurring in the Muslim ghettoes. Cars burn on most nights, and it no longer makes headlines unless the count gets above 200 or so. The obvious cultural disconnect, along with the moribund French economy under Socialist policies, has created a shift in mood for the French."
Bring back French fries! Like many bloggers, Republican Mike at Mike's America declares a victory for the United States here: "Sarkozy's election is just the latest trend from the last few years which have seen increasingly pro-American conservatives elected to governments in Australia, Germany, Canada and Japan. All of the above have stressed the importance of a strong relationship with the United States. And we're constantly told how we've alienated our allies?"
Conservative Andrew Sullivan also strikes a triumphant note: "Sarko is not a visceral anti-American, unlike many of his peers. In that sense, we have gained a new and stronger ally in the war against Islamism. Now to make that war more effective and intelligent."
At Captain's Quarters, conservative Ed Morrissey asserts that French fatigue with rioting in the banlieus contributed to Sarkozy's success: "Of course, part of the reason Sarkozy won … is because of the continuous violence occurring in the Muslim ghettoes. Cars burn on most nights, and it no longer makes headlines unless the count gets above 200 or so. The obvious cultural disconnect, along with the moribund French economy under Socialist policies, has created a shift in mood for the French."
Bring back French fries! Like many bloggers, Republican Mike at Mike's America declares a victory for the United States here: "Sarkozy's election is just the latest trend from the last few years which have seen increasingly pro-American conservatives elected to governments in Australia, Germany, Canada and Japan. All of the above have stressed the importance of a strong relationship with the United States. And we're constantly told how we've alienated our allies?"
Conservative Andrew Sullivan also strikes a triumphant note: "Sarko is not a visceral anti-American, unlike many of his peers. In that sense, we have gained a new and stronger ally in the war against Islamism. Now to make that war more effective and intelligent."
Monday, May 07, 2007
A new Rasmussen poll shows that 35% of Democrats believe Bush knew about the 9/11 attacks in advance.
Democrats in America are evenly divided on the question of whether George W. Bush knew about the 9/11 terrorist attacks in advance. Thirty-five percent (35%) of Democrats believe he did know, 39% say he did not know, and 26% are not sure.
Republicans reject that view and, by a 7-to-1 margin, say the President did not know in advance about the attacks. Among those not affiliated with either major party, 18% believe the President knew and 57% take the opposite view.
Overall, 22% of all voters believe the President knew about the attacks in advance. A slightly larger number, 29%, believe the CIA knew about the attacks in advance.
Democrats in America are evenly divided on the question of whether George W. Bush knew about the 9/11 terrorist attacks in advance. Thirty-five percent (35%) of Democrats believe he did know, 39% say he did not know, and 26% are not sure.
Republicans reject that view and, by a 7-to-1 margin, say the President did not know in advance about the attacks. Among those not affiliated with either major party, 18% believe the President knew and 57% take the opposite view.
Overall, 22% of all voters believe the President knew about the attacks in advance. A slightly larger number, 29%, believe the CIA knew about the attacks in advance.
AP's Latest Anti-Bush Article Makes Amateurish Error
The Associated Press long ago dropped any pretense of being unbiased about the Bush administration, and as a matter of policy, they’ve been doing everything possible to damage the war effort. And in their latest openly biased story they show that they’re also hiring illiterates as writers, as Deb Riechmann makes a beginner’s mistake and misuses the term “begs the question:”
White House searches for war czar.
WASHINGTON - Now that the White House is searching for a “war czar,” it begs the question of who has been coordinating U.S. involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan the past four years.
Definition: begs the question.
An argument that improperly assumes as true the very point the speaker is trying to argue for is said in formal logic to “beg the question.” Here is an example of a question-begging argument: “This painting is trash because it is obviously worthless.” The speaker is simply asserting the worthlessness of the work, not presenting any evidence to demonstrate that this is in fact the case. Since we never use “begs” with this odd meaning (“to improperly take for granted”) in any other phrase, many people mistakenly suppose the phrase implies something quite different: that the argument demands that a question about it be asked—raises the question. If you’re not comfortable with formal terms of logic, it’s best to stay away from this phrase, or risk embarrassing yourself.
This is from an article mind you, not a editorial.
The Associated Press long ago dropped any pretense of being unbiased about the Bush administration, and as a matter of policy, they’ve been doing everything possible to damage the war effort. And in their latest openly biased story they show that they’re also hiring illiterates as writers, as Deb Riechmann makes a beginner’s mistake and misuses the term “begs the question:”
White House searches for war czar.
WASHINGTON - Now that the White House is searching for a “war czar,” it begs the question of who has been coordinating U.S. involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan the past four years.
Definition: begs the question.
An argument that improperly assumes as true the very point the speaker is trying to argue for is said in formal logic to “beg the question.” Here is an example of a question-begging argument: “This painting is trash because it is obviously worthless.” The speaker is simply asserting the worthlessness of the work, not presenting any evidence to demonstrate that this is in fact the case. Since we never use “begs” with this odd meaning (“to improperly take for granted”) in any other phrase, many people mistakenly suppose the phrase implies something quite different: that the argument demands that a question about it be asked—raises the question. If you’re not comfortable with formal terms of logic, it’s best to stay away from this phrase, or risk embarrassing yourself.
This is from an article mind you, not a editorial.
It may be the ultimate Islamist-Leftist Convergence, a black hole of malignant idiocy and murderous intent so massive that it warps time and space:
MARXISM 2007: A Festival of Resistance.
May 10-13, 2007 Bahen Centre for Information Technology, University of Toronto 40 St. George Street (north of College Street)
a four day conference of over fifty workshops, artistic display and performances. If you are against imperialism, war, corporate greed and destruction of the environment, if you want to learn about and organize for a new world of peace, freedom and liberation then don’t miss Marxism: A Festival of Resistance
Blazing Cat Fur has an excellent rundown of the creepy, insane, and diabolical people and organizations involved. This is a big one.
MARXISM 2007: A Festival of Resistance.
May 10-13, 2007 Bahen Centre for Information Technology, University of Toronto 40 St. George Street (north of College Street)
a four day conference of over fifty workshops, artistic display and performances. If you are against imperialism, war, corporate greed and destruction of the environment, if you want to learn about and organize for a new world of peace, freedom and liberation then don’t miss Marxism: A Festival of Resistance
Blazing Cat Fur has an excellent rundown of the creepy, insane, and diabolical people and organizations involved. This is a big one.
The Associated Press files this story of Dark Ages misogyny in Sweden under “Odd News:” Soccer game for priests, imams canceled.
STOCKHOLM, Sweden - A soccer game between Muslim imams and Christian priests at the end of a conference to promote interfaith dialogue was canceled Saturday because the teams could not agree on whether women priests should take part.
Church of Norway spokesman Olav Fykse Tveit said the imams refused to play against a mixed-gender team of priests because it would have gone against their beliefs in avoiding close physical contact with strange women.
The church decided to drop its female players and the priests’ team captain walked out in protest.
Hours before the game was to end the daylong “Shoulder to Shoulder” conference in Oslo, the church released a statement saying it had called off the match because it was sending the wrong signal.
Oddly enough!
STOCKHOLM, Sweden - A soccer game between Muslim imams and Christian priests at the end of a conference to promote interfaith dialogue was canceled Saturday because the teams could not agree on whether women priests should take part.
Church of Norway spokesman Olav Fykse Tveit said the imams refused to play against a mixed-gender team of priests because it would have gone against their beliefs in avoiding close physical contact with strange women.
The church decided to drop its female players and the priests’ team captain walked out in protest.
Hours before the game was to end the daylong “Shoulder to Shoulder” conference in Oslo, the church released a statement saying it had called off the match because it was sending the wrong signal.
Oddly enough!
Friday, May 04, 2007
Now I am a Beaver Believer!
Oregonian is Chosen Playboy's Top BunnyPosted by Oregonian Staff May 04, 2007 08:57AM
Categories: Top Stories
Oregon's Sara Jean Underwood has been named Playboy magazine's 2007 Playmate of the Year. Her selection came as a surprise to the 23-year-old, who figured her freckles and low-profile native state would make her odd girl out.
"I didn't think I was pretty enough," she said of her modeling prospects. "I'm 5'3", short, freckle-faced. I'm from Oregon. It wasn't a thought in my mind that I could do something like that."
In fact, hearing she'd managed to reach the top of the bunny heap made her feel sick.
"I thought I was going to puke," she said. "I thought I was going to faint. I thought I was going to cry. It was every emotion you can imagine one would feel when given such an honor." Underwood beat out 11 others to become the magazine's 48th Playmate of the Year. Check out a surfeit of photos (some revealing) along with a smattering of trivia about her (she's afraid of "spiders and semi trucks") at her MySpace page.
Her title and the start of her yearlong reign were celebrated Thursday with a backyard luncheon under a tent at Hugh Hefner's famous Playboy Mansion, with the yard filled with current and former playmates, more than 50 dating back to the 1950s. (Take a tour of the mansion here.)
Playboy photographers first met her when they visited Oregon State University looking for candidates for the "Girls of the Pac 10" pictorial. She did her school proud by ending up on the cover of that issue in October 2005. She went on to pose for the centerfold of the July 2006 issue. Underwood now heads to Louisville, Ky., where she will host Playboy's Kentucky Derby party. And she'll make an appearance in downtown Portland on May 11 at Rich's Cigar Store.
www.viceland.com
Finally a website that gets it right. For years the internet has been clogged with tits and ass, but they always missed that special something: protruding veins. Veinywoman.com is bursting with skinny goddesses flaunting blood vessels that pulse with 100% pure sex. Nothing spells BONER like broads who actually look like a boner.
Thursday, May 03, 2007
“I’m a huge underdog. I did my homework and I’m going to be prepared. I’m going to try and force him to make mistakes,” said Matt Serra regarding Georges St. Pierre prior to the biggest fight of his career. “I don’t get swept up in the whole hype of things.”He overcame the odds. He stunned the critics. He did the unthinkable. “I’ve been the hammer in some fights and I’ve been the nail.”Last Saturday night, Matt “The Terror” Serra laid the hammer on Georges St. Pierre and pulled off arguably the greatest upset in MMA history. Coming into the fight as a heavy underdog, Serra overcame mountainous odds and became the first fighter to ever finish St. Pierre.“It was just unbelievable. I did it, I pulled it off,” elated Serra. “He’s a very tough guy. I’m sure if I gave him a little bit of time he would have recovered. I smelt the blood; I saw that he was definitely wobbly and I wanted to finish him off.”As the first American to earn a black belt in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu under Renzo Gracie, the 32-year old fighter is very proud to be under the tutelage of his mentor and attributes his success to him. “Renzo is like family to me; I’m with Renzo forever. I remember where I came from,” graciously expressed Serra. “I’m very proud to be the first American black belt under Renzo and I wouldn’t be where I’m at without him. He’s not just a friend; he’s like family to me.” Matt Serra has spent most of his career fighting in the Octagon and holds notable wins over Yves Edwards, Shooto Americas Champion Jeff Curran and Ivan Menjivar. After losing a decision to Karo Parisyan at UFC 53, Serra saw an opportunity to put himself back into the spotlight and moved up to welterweight to compete on the Ultimate Fighter. The fourth season of the reality show focused on veteran fighters and was suitably named “The Comeback”. The Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu black belt defeated Chris Lytle in the finale and earned a title shot at Georges St. Pierre. The rest is history.Critics scoffed at the thought of Matt Serra getting a title shot, claiming he was undeserving of such a coveted opportunity. Whether he deserved a title shot or not is irrelevant now. The 1999 Pan American Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu champion made the best of an opportune situation and achieved the most defining moment of his career.So what lies ahead for the newly crowned champion? Matt Hughes. According to Dana White at the UFC 69 post-fight press conference, former champion Hughes will be next in line to challenge Serra for the welterweight belt. After his huge win over Georges St. Pierre, Matt Hughes was seen in the audience laughing and pointing at the fallen Canadian. Serra felt that his actions were very disrespectful and wasn’t hesitant to candidly express his opinion about the Miletich fighter. “I don’t like the guy; I think he’s very arrogant. [He’s] disrespectful. The guy wants to talk in the name of God saying ‘he’s a Christian’ and this and that. Why don’t you treat people the right way? I don’t like the way he treats people and I’m sure I’m not the only one.” “I would love to fight Matt. The thing is this, I feel like a winner already. Even if lose, I get to punch and elbow him in the face,” continued the UFC Welterweight Champion. “Don’t get me wrong, I plan on beating his ***. No matter what happens, the fact that I get to hit that a******, I feel like a winner. I’m not knocking on his past accomplishments. The guy is a great fighter. When I fight him, it’s going to be a very tough and exciting fight. But if I ever talk about myself in the third person… punch me in the face.”With a renewed confidence, an upcoming wedding and a shiny new belt, Matt Serra looks to the future and continue what he enjoys doing. “Why be in this game if you’re not going to have fun with it? It’s not like I have to fight; I enjoy it. To me, there’s no other way, I love the challenge of it.” Matt Serra shocked the MMA world. His amazing performance garnered him many new fans and redefined his career. Above all, Serra has finally earned the respect he deserves.“I’m enjoying this ride no matter where it takes me. I’m just going to leave it in the cage every time. From here on out, I look forward to putting on exciting, memorable fights.”
Tuesday, May 01, 2007
A Loser's History
George Tenet's sniveling, self-justifying new book is a disgrace.
By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Monday, April 30, 2007, at 11:37 AM ET
It's difficult to see why George Tenet would be so incautious as to write his own self-justifying apologia, let alone give it the portentous title At the Center of the Storm. There is already a perfectly good pro-Tenet book written by a man who knows how to employ the overworked term storm. Bob Woodward's 2002 effort, Bush at War, was, in many of its aspects, almost dictated by George Tenet. How do we know this? Well, Tenet is described on the opening page as "a hefty, outgoing son of Greek immigrants," which means that he talked to Woodward on background. Further compliments are showered upon him. We discover that his main protector on Capitol Hill, Sen. David Boren, who represented Oklahoma until 1994, had implored President-elect Bush to retain this Clinton-era head of the CIA and if he had any doubts, to "ask your father":
When the younger Bush did, the former President George H.W. Bush said: "From what I hear, he's a good fellow," one of the highest accolades in the Bush family lexicon. Tenet … later led the effort to rename CIA headquarters for Bush, himself a former DCI.
No need to draw a very complex picture here: Tenet knows how the kiss-up and kiss-down game is played. And, for a rather mediocre man, he did well enough out of the arrangement while it lasted. Woodward was even willing to describe him as one who "had developed an understanding of the importance of human intelligence, HUMINT in spycraft." But let's not get ahead of ourselves. I only mean to say that it was a very favorably disposed chronicler who wrote this, in describing Tenet's reaction on the terrible morning of Sept. 11, 2001:
"This has bin Laden all over it," Tenet told Boren. "I've got to go." He also had another reaction, one that raised the real possibility that the CIA and the FBI had not done all that could have been done to prevent the terrorist attack. "I wonder," Tenet said, "if it has anything to do with this guy taking pilot training."
Notice the direct quotes that make it clear who is the author of this brilliant insight. And then pause for a second. The author is almost the only man who could have known of Zacarias Moussaoui and his co-conspirators—the very man who positively knew they were among us, in flight schools, and then decided to leave them alone. In his latest effusion, he writes: "I do know one thing in my gut. Al-Qaeda is here and waiting." Well, we all know that much by now. But Tenet is one of the few who knew it then, and not just in his "gut" but in his small brain, and who left us all under open skies. His ridiculous agency, supposedly committed to "HUMINT" under his leadership, could not even do what John Walker Lindh had done—namely, infiltrate the Taliban and the Bin Laden circle. It's for this reason that the CIA now has to rely on torturing the few suspects it can catch, a policy, incidentally, that Tenet's book warmly defends.
So, the only really interesting question is why the president did not fire this vain and useless person on the very first day of the war. Instead, he awarded him a Presidential Medal of Freedom! Tenet is now so self-pitying that he expects us to believe that he was "not at all sure that [he] really wanted to accept" this honor. But it seems that he allowed or persuaded himself to do so, given that the citation didn't mention Iraq. You could imagine that Tenet had never sat directly behind Colin Powell at the United Nations, beaming like an overfed cat, as the secretary of state went through his rather ill-starred presentation. And who cares whether his "slam dunk" vulgarity was misquoted or not? We have better evidence than that. Here is what Tenet told the relevant Senate committee in February 2002:
Iraq … has also had contacts with al-Qaida. Their ties may be limited by divergent ideologies, but the two sides' mutual antipathy toward the United States and the Saudi royal family suggests that tactical cooperation between them is possible, even though Saddam is well aware that such activity would carry serious consequences.
As even the notion of it certainly should have done. At around the same time, on another nontrivial matter, Tenet informed the Senate armed services committee that: "We believe that Saddam never abandoned his nuclear weapons program." It is a little bit late for him to pose as if Iraq was a threat concocted in some crepuscular corner of the vice president's office. And it's pathetic for him to say, even in the feeble way that he chooses to phrase it, that "there was never a serious debate that I know of within the administration about the imminence of the Iraqi threat." (Emphasis added.) There had been a very serious debate over the course of at least three preceding administrations, whether Tenet "knew" of it or not. (He was only an intelligence specialist, after all.) As for his bawling and sobbing claim that faced with crisis in Iraq, "the administration's message was: Don't blame us. George Tenet and the CIA got us into this mess," I can say, as one who has attended about a thousand postmortems on Iraq in Washington, that I have never, ever, not once heard a single partisan of the administration say anything of the kind. The White House may have thought that it could count on the CIA to present some sort of solidity in a crisis but, as Sept. 11 had already proved, more fool the White House.
In the post-Kuwait-war period, there was little political risk in doing what Tenet had always done and making the worst assumption about anything that Saddam Hussein might even be thinking about. (Who but an abject idiot would ever make a different assumption or grant the Baathists the smallest benefit of the least doubt?) But we forget so soon and so easily. The problem used to be the diametrically opposite one. The whole of our vaunted "intelligence" system completely refused to believe any of the warnings that Saddam Hussein was about to invade and occupy Kuwait in 1990. By the time the menace was taken seriously, the invasion itself was under way. This is why the work of Kenneth Pollack (this time titled The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq) was received with such gravity when it was published in 2002. Pollack had interpreted the signals correctly in 1990—and been ignored—and was arguing that another final round with Saddam was inevitable. His book did more to persuade policy-makers in Washington than anything ever said by Ahmad Chalabi. To revisit these arguments is to be reminded that no thinking person ever felt that the danger posed by a totalitarian and aggressive Iraq was a negligible one. And now comes Tenet, the man who got everything wrong and who ran the agency that couldn't think straight, to ask us to sympathize with his moanings about "Iraq—who, me?"
A highly irritating expression in Washington has it that "hindsight is always 20-20." Would that it were so. History is not a matter of hindsight and is not, in fact, always written by the victors. In this case, a bogus history is being offered by a real loser whose hindsight is cockeyed and who had no foresight at all.
Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair and the author of God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2165269/
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George Tenet's sniveling, self-justifying new book is a disgrace.
By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Monday, April 30, 2007, at 11:37 AM ET
It's difficult to see why George Tenet would be so incautious as to write his own self-justifying apologia, let alone give it the portentous title At the Center of the Storm. There is already a perfectly good pro-Tenet book written by a man who knows how to employ the overworked term storm. Bob Woodward's 2002 effort, Bush at War, was, in many of its aspects, almost dictated by George Tenet. How do we know this? Well, Tenet is described on the opening page as "a hefty, outgoing son of Greek immigrants," which means that he talked to Woodward on background. Further compliments are showered upon him. We discover that his main protector on Capitol Hill, Sen. David Boren, who represented Oklahoma until 1994, had implored President-elect Bush to retain this Clinton-era head of the CIA and if he had any doubts, to "ask your father":
When the younger Bush did, the former President George H.W. Bush said: "From what I hear, he's a good fellow," one of the highest accolades in the Bush family lexicon. Tenet … later led the effort to rename CIA headquarters for Bush, himself a former DCI.
No need to draw a very complex picture here: Tenet knows how the kiss-up and kiss-down game is played. And, for a rather mediocre man, he did well enough out of the arrangement while it lasted. Woodward was even willing to describe him as one who "had developed an understanding of the importance of human intelligence, HUMINT in spycraft." But let's not get ahead of ourselves. I only mean to say that it was a very favorably disposed chronicler who wrote this, in describing Tenet's reaction on the terrible morning of Sept. 11, 2001:
"This has bin Laden all over it," Tenet told Boren. "I've got to go." He also had another reaction, one that raised the real possibility that the CIA and the FBI had not done all that could have been done to prevent the terrorist attack. "I wonder," Tenet said, "if it has anything to do with this guy taking pilot training."
Notice the direct quotes that make it clear who is the author of this brilliant insight. And then pause for a second. The author is almost the only man who could have known of Zacarias Moussaoui and his co-conspirators—the very man who positively knew they were among us, in flight schools, and then decided to leave them alone. In his latest effusion, he writes: "I do know one thing in my gut. Al-Qaeda is here and waiting." Well, we all know that much by now. But Tenet is one of the few who knew it then, and not just in his "gut" but in his small brain, and who left us all under open skies. His ridiculous agency, supposedly committed to "HUMINT" under his leadership, could not even do what John Walker Lindh had done—namely, infiltrate the Taliban and the Bin Laden circle. It's for this reason that the CIA now has to rely on torturing the few suspects it can catch, a policy, incidentally, that Tenet's book warmly defends.
So, the only really interesting question is why the president did not fire this vain and useless person on the very first day of the war. Instead, he awarded him a Presidential Medal of Freedom! Tenet is now so self-pitying that he expects us to believe that he was "not at all sure that [he] really wanted to accept" this honor. But it seems that he allowed or persuaded himself to do so, given that the citation didn't mention Iraq. You could imagine that Tenet had never sat directly behind Colin Powell at the United Nations, beaming like an overfed cat, as the secretary of state went through his rather ill-starred presentation. And who cares whether his "slam dunk" vulgarity was misquoted or not? We have better evidence than that. Here is what Tenet told the relevant Senate committee in February 2002:
Iraq … has also had contacts with al-Qaida. Their ties may be limited by divergent ideologies, but the two sides' mutual antipathy toward the United States and the Saudi royal family suggests that tactical cooperation between them is possible, even though Saddam is well aware that such activity would carry serious consequences.
As even the notion of it certainly should have done. At around the same time, on another nontrivial matter, Tenet informed the Senate armed services committee that: "We believe that Saddam never abandoned his nuclear weapons program." It is a little bit late for him to pose as if Iraq was a threat concocted in some crepuscular corner of the vice president's office. And it's pathetic for him to say, even in the feeble way that he chooses to phrase it, that "there was never a serious debate that I know of within the administration about the imminence of the Iraqi threat." (Emphasis added.) There had been a very serious debate over the course of at least three preceding administrations, whether Tenet "knew" of it or not. (He was only an intelligence specialist, after all.) As for his bawling and sobbing claim that faced with crisis in Iraq, "the administration's message was: Don't blame us. George Tenet and the CIA got us into this mess," I can say, as one who has attended about a thousand postmortems on Iraq in Washington, that I have never, ever, not once heard a single partisan of the administration say anything of the kind. The White House may have thought that it could count on the CIA to present some sort of solidity in a crisis but, as Sept. 11 had already proved, more fool the White House.
In the post-Kuwait-war period, there was little political risk in doing what Tenet had always done and making the worst assumption about anything that Saddam Hussein might even be thinking about. (Who but an abject idiot would ever make a different assumption or grant the Baathists the smallest benefit of the least doubt?) But we forget so soon and so easily. The problem used to be the diametrically opposite one. The whole of our vaunted "intelligence" system completely refused to believe any of the warnings that Saddam Hussein was about to invade and occupy Kuwait in 1990. By the time the menace was taken seriously, the invasion itself was under way. This is why the work of Kenneth Pollack (this time titled The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq) was received with such gravity when it was published in 2002. Pollack had interpreted the signals correctly in 1990—and been ignored—and was arguing that another final round with Saddam was inevitable. His book did more to persuade policy-makers in Washington than anything ever said by Ahmad Chalabi. To revisit these arguments is to be reminded that no thinking person ever felt that the danger posed by a totalitarian and aggressive Iraq was a negligible one. And now comes Tenet, the man who got everything wrong and who ran the agency that couldn't think straight, to ask us to sympathize with his moanings about "Iraq—who, me?"
A highly irritating expression in Washington has it that "hindsight is always 20-20." Would that it were so. History is not a matter of hindsight and is not, in fact, always written by the victors. In this case, a bogus history is being offered by a real loser whose hindsight is cockeyed and who had no foresight at all.
Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair and the author of God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2165269/
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