Thanks to Michelle Malkin for the tip.



First check out this obituary for Stephen James BYRNE, in the Seattle Times. It starts out normal enough with a nice photo of the family.

...his love of sailing, biking, cross country skiing, diving, hiking. His love of an incredible mountain vista, how the leaves turned gold in the fall, a great bottle of wine and a wonderful meal with friends, a long ride around Lake Washington or up Washington Pass, completing the STP bike ride for the first time, and the second. He loved his friends and family as well, and we loved him. More than anything in the world, Steve loved his daughters, Kelsey and Hayley. He was at every soccer game, every school performance, every important event in their lives. He taught them how to do all the things he loved - ride bicycles, go sea kayaking, ski, or simply find some good snow to play in. They read together, played games, went to movies, worked on school projects. He hiked halfway up Mount Rainier with them when they were very young, and all the way up on his own. He taught them by example to love the world, to be adventurous, and to be gentle. There is great tragedy in how his life ended, and theirs, but know that this was a loving, good man who did the best he could while struggling against an incomprehensible burden that none of those of us who loved him could have known.

Man kills himself; daughters also dead

EDMONDS -- He e-mailed a suicide note to friends letting them know he planned to kill his two young daughters and himself, then the Edmonds man apparently followed through.

Yesterday, alerted by friends alarmed by his note, Edmonds police officers arrived at a home in a quiet neighborhood at 12:42 p.m. and discovered the bodies of Stephen James Byrne, 50, and his two daughters.

John Kerry's nightmarish challenge by his Swift Boat veterans and their allies may not be over.

NewsMax recently chatted with Jerry Corsi, the co-author with Swiftee John O'Neill of "Unfit for Command" – the runaway New York Times best seller that torpedoed Kerry's presidential campaign.

Attending a conference in the suburbs of Washington recently, Corsi let it be known that he is actively considering a run against Sen. Kerry when his term is up.

Corsi is not a Massachusetts native, but says he has already scouted for property to declare his residence there.

He appeared excited about the challenge. Federal law allows him to declare his candidacy at any time and open up a full fusillade against the Senate's most liberal member.

Democrats, according to pollsters, receive votes from the least educated and the most educated, from grade school dropouts to college presidents. This suggests parallels between the undereducated and the overeducated that most professors don't wish to entertain. Illiterates and intellectuals form the odd couple of the Democratic Party. How did it happen? One explanation is that both groups are drawn to the party's emotional demagoguery. Having lost contact with common sense through a skeptical distrust of reason, postmodernist professors more or less decide their politics on raw emotion -- the same passions that stir their uneducated fellow Democrats.

The earlier virus reported in CNet News by By Robert Lemos last Friday, dubbed "Skulls" by antivirus companies, was disguised as a theme manager for Nokia phones in the Symbian Installation System format. When the Skulls program is run, it breaks all links to Symbian system applications and replaces the icons with images of skulls. (see below)



Monday CNet writers Dan Ilett and Matt Hines report that virus writers have unleashed a second version of the "Skulls" Trojan horse packaged with the cell phone virus Cabir.B, also a trojan.

The hybrid Skulls.B Trojan horse displays images of skulls instead of the program icons on handsets running the Symbian operating system, software maker F-Secure said in an advisory Monday. It also releases the Cabir.B worm, the company said.

Cabir, which asks its victims if they would like to be infected, was thought to be a proof-of-concept virus when it was released earlier this year. The virus spreads by sending itself to other handsets within Bluetooth broadcasting range.

Phones infected with the Skulls.B hybrid can infect nearby handsets with Cabir. The Trojan horse, though, can only be downloaded and does not spread using Cabir as a vehicle. Skulls was originally distributed on Symbian shareware Web sites as "Extended Theme Manager."

When infected with Cabir, a phone displays the word "Caribe" on a screen as the worm modifies the Symbian operating system and looks for other cell phones to target.

F-Secure said that cell phones from manufacturers such as Nokia, Siemens, Panasonic and Sendo were vulnerable. It has posted advice on disinfecting cell phones on its Web site.

[snip]

"The biggest difference from PC viruses to phone applications are the direct links to money," he said. "If you can infect a phone you can immediately begin making calls or sending text messages to toll numbers in order to steal from someone. The theft will happen a lot faster than it did with PCs."

"Being friends with the United States doesn't mean agreeing with everything," said a senior adviser in Prime Minister Paul Martin's government.

Carroll, who has also been invited to sit on a U.N. "leadership council" on women and AIDS, will announce Wednesday that Canada is increasing its annual $13.1-million contribution to the population fund to $67.4 million over four years — about $16.9 million each year.

Most of that will go toward core financing of the program that has been seriously damaged by the U.S. boycott over the past three years.

About $9 million of Canada's $67.4 million, meanwhile, will be specifically directed to a fund for birth-control supplies such as condoms.

The United States sent $34 million a year to the U.N. Population Fund until 2002, when the Bush administration cut off the American contribution, alleging the program helped support coerced abortions and forced sterilization programs in China.

The U.N. Population Fund, which helps finance population and reproductive health programs, denies the allegations and continues to press the United States not to punish women and children worldwide through this boycott. It argues that the U.S.-conservative-driven cut may have caused more abortions than any it claimed to prevent.

Although the technique is cumbersome and costly, the experiment published in an online version of the British journal Nature Medicine is being touted as "the first demonstration of an efficient therapeutic vaccine against AIDS."

The vaccine was tested in Brazil on 18 volunteers who were already infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, but who were not yet taking any antiviral drugs. After four months, the level of HIV in their bloodstreams had been reduced an average of 80 percent.

By the end of one year, eight patients in the group had maintained a 90 percent reduction in virus particles in their bloodstream. Four of those patients had virus levels so low that they were comparable to so-called "long-term non-progressors," a rare cohort of people infected with HIV who never seem to get sick.

Unlike a conventional vaccine, this one cannot block infection from occurring. However, if the French technique could be perfected, it has the potential to keep some HIV-infected patients healthy without their having to take the three-drug "cocktails" of toxic antiviral drugs.

Instead, a series of injections, perhaps once a year, would keep their chronic infections in check.

The lead investigators in the French study are Drs. Jean-Marie Andrieu and Wei Lu of the Institute of Research for Vaccines and Immunotherapies for Cancer and AIDS, in Paris.

In an interview, Andrieu estimated that the cost of the annual therapy could be $4,000 to $8,000, less than a year's course of antiviral drugs. He said the only side effect of the therapy was a swelling of the lymph nodes, which caused no pain. The swelling was, in fact, an indicator that the vaccine was marshalling the body's immune system properly to ward off the AIDS virus.

No new patients have been enrolled in the experiment, but Andrieu said future research will attempt to understand "why it works in some people, and not in others.''

Although the experiment falls short of a breakthrough against AIDS, it represents a rare piece of good news in the field of vaccine research, which has been marked in recent years by a string of setbacks.

UCSF doctor sees cause for hope

"This is just a preliminary study, but it is encouraging,'' said virologist Dr. Jay Levy of the UCSF AIDS Research Institute. Levy did not participate in the research but is familiar with its findings.

For now, Rove's goals are at once more immediate and more lofty: to design a legislative and philosophical agenda that will lead to further GOP gains, and beyond that to a political dominance that could last for decades, as FDR's New Deal did. The core principles are clear to anyone who listened to a Bush stump speech. They are drawn from a well of conservative (and, in the 19th-century sense, "liberal") dogma: that only free-market democracies respectful of traditional moral values can bring us a planet of fulfilled citizens secure from terror. In fact, Rove's formulation is a new hybrid, willing to use big government in the service of markets and morality. Asked to name Bush's biggest accomplishment thus far, Rove replied in a flash: "His clear-eyed explanation of how to win the war on terrorism. It was the defining moment of our time." In other words, the Architect plans to be fully engaged in formulating foreign policy—and, while he isn't thought of as a leading neocon, his views are squarely within that camp.

On domestic policy, Rove has a theme at the ready: "the ownership society" he says the president wants to build. It's a bland phrase, but the ideas behind it are hardly status quo. One is to consider abolishing the income-tax system, replacing "progressive" (meaning graduated) rates with a flat tax or even a national sales tax or value-added tax. Another is to rechannel massive flows of tax money from Social Security to private savings accounts and into expanded medical savings accounts. Yet another is a crusade Bush and Rove have been pursuing since Texas: a national cap on damage awards in lawsuits.

In all cases, Rove wants to force Democrats to defend taxes and lawyers. Trained in the ways of direct-mail targeting, he doesn't want to seduce the whole country, just an expanded version of what he's already got. He's aiming at fast-growing exurban areas, where small-business entrepreneurs—mostly Gen-Xers—tend to distrust the New Deal paradigm of government. "We want to pay increased attention to those vibrant small-business climates," says Rove.

And it is in these places, where suburbs meet what's left of the countryside, that the GOP's conservative stands on social issues are welcome even (perhaps even especially) among younger families searching for stability and reassurance in a world of Darwinian economics. In the next term, Rove said, Bush will push—hard—for a constitutional amendment to define marriage as a union of man and woman, and for "strict constructionist" judges. "Voters like the president because he doesn't blink and he doesn't waver," says Rove, "and he isn't going to start. He says he values life, and he means it." The cold calculus: force Democrats to defend gay rights and unfettered access to abortion.

OTTAWA -- A coalition of anti-war protesters, left-wing lawyers and anti-capitalists refused repeatedly yesterday to condemn those who might resort to violence during the "loud" demonstrations planned for the visit next week of U.S. President George W. Bush.

"A number of protesters are coming together to protest the real violence going on around the world right now," said Joe Cressy of the No To Bush campaign, which is organizing two large demonstrations for Nov. 30, the day Mr. Bush will be in Ottawa. "People are angry at Bush. People are going to express themselves through art, through direct action, through a number of different formats."

Mr. Cressy would not define what he means by direct action, but his committee has already said it will offer medical and legal help to protesters who need it. "Police response can sometimes act as a provocateur of violence," he said.

Dozens of busloads of people angry with the policies of the U.S. administration are expected to travel to the Canadian capital for Mr. Bush's first official visit to Ottawa. And while numbers are still unclear, organizers say protesters will be coming from as far away as Winnipeg and Fredericton.

" . . . George Bush must be brought to justice rather than treated as a guest in Canada," said Amy Bartholomew, a spokeswoman for the group Lawyers Against the War. "[The organization] is requesting that the Canadian government at least rescind its invitation and deny President Bush's entry into Canada on the basis of Canadian immigration law which bars entry to those who have engaged in gross violations of human rights."

Rachelle Waterman, 16, Jason Arrant, 24, and Brian Radel, 24, were each indicted in Ketchikan Friday on first-degree murder, conspiracy to commit murder and other charges related to the Nov. 14 death of 48-year-old Lauri Waterman, who worked as a teacher's aide.

The three are incarcerated at Ketchikan Correctional Center. They will be arraigned Monday in Ketchikan Superior Court, according to assistant district attorney Dan Schally.

Radel abducted the woman from her home, bound and gagged her and drove her in her own van to a spot 30 miles north of Craig on Prince of Wales Island, according to authorities. They said that's where Radel struck the fatal blow with a blunt instrument.

Radel and Arrant then drove to the end of a logging road on the island and set the van and the body on fire, troopers said.

Just to let everyone know, my mother was murdered

I won't have computer acess until the weekend or so because the police took my computer to go through the hard drive. I thank everyone for their thoughts and e-mails, I hope to talk to you when I get my computer back.

Just ask County Judge Susan "Wendy" Whicher, who served four years before being voted off the bench in November by only five votes out of more than 1,000 cast.

"They (locals) tolerated me with great grace," said Whicher, 61, who practiced law for 20 years in Denver and for five in nearby Mancos before being appointed to the bench by Gov. Bill Owens in 2001.

"I was a round peg in a square hole," she said. "But it was hard to tell if my being a lawyer or an outsider was the round peg. At first, I was hurt (when voted off the bench), but then I realized it wasn't me. It was what I represented - change."

The change probably came from her being both a lawyer and an outsider.

Whicher replaced Bob Johnson, a local rancher, "a pretty good roper" and former sheriff who spent 20 years on the Dolores bench. Johnson followed William Paul Spitzer, a non-lawyer, who followed Helen Hicks, a non-lawyer who followed her husband, George, a lawyer.

A quirk in state law requires a county judge to live in the county but doesn't require that the person be a lawyer, at least in counties with fewer than 35,000 residents.

Dolores, at 1,100 square miles, is practically the size of Rhode Island, yet has only 1,800 residents and two lawyers: Whicher and Eric Heil, who doesn't want the job.

"It works fine without a lawyer. Judge Johnson knew most of the families that appeared before him," said Sandy Weaver, the county's judicial administrator since 1979. "There are a lot of matters that being a lawyer would make it easier. But the court has limited jurisdiction, mostly traffic, small claims, misdemeanors and civil cases. So you don't have to be an attorney."

... They will say that the Iraqi elections will be a flop, turnout will be low, and that Saddam's supporters will likely come back to power. They will also tell us that only American soldiers are getting killed, with no reference to the brave Iraqis fighting to take their country back from the terrorists. Here are the top 10 reasons why they are wrong.

10. Despite the overwhelming media focus on trouble spots, these are all in the so-called Sunni Triangle, where just 20 percent of the population live. The fact that all the CNN cameras are in this one area doesn't make it representative of Iraq as a whole.

9. There are as many people in the Kurdish regions in the north, as there are in the Sunni Triangle. The Kurdish regions have had successful multi-party democracies for 12 years.

8. The majority Shias (60 percent of the population) are keen to participate. Spiritual leaders, including Ayatollah Sistani, have urged people to vote and even calling it a religious duty. Under this doctrine, people who don't vote can go to hell.

7. The electoral system chosen (national lists) is not particularly vulnerable to intimidation. Votes are counted locally but the totals are calculated nationally, and seats in parliament are awarded in proportion to votes. A gang that intimidates voters locally will have almost no impact on the national vote.

6. A boycott by Sunnis would be counterproductive. In the U.S., representation is allocated to each state according to population. Under national lists, the weight of any region or strand of opinion is determined by turnout. If Sunnis stay at home, Sunni candidates don't get elected.

5. The coalition has trained a new Iraqi army, which is taking on more and more of the security role. Claims by Western critics that America alone is keeping the provisional government in power and that 90 percent of the coalition military casualties have been American are simply wrong. The Iraqi army is the main force in Iraq now and has suffered more casualties from terrorists than American forces. But the terrorists who attack the Iraqi army have very little support.

4. The turnout is going to be huge. Liberal journalists will report on the day that turnout is disappointing, because they will only be counting in Baghdad. When votes come in from Kurdish and Shia areas it will prove to be even bigger than the American turnout, which itself was up by a fifth from 2000.

3. People in Iraq are fed up with war. They know that the only way to end the series of wars that Saddam led them into is to empower a democratic, probably Western-oriented, government to stamp out the Saddam loyalists who are disrupting Iraqi life.

2. More and more people in Iraq have access to the Internet and other free information sources. They no longer have to trust government propaganda. Al Jazeera, and a growing network of Iraqi bloggers - most of whom regard Americans as allies - give Iraqis access to freedom of speech.

But the biggest reason the Iraqi elections will be a success is ...

1. Western liberals who claim that Arabs don't want or aren't ready for democracy are just wrong. What liberals call "Western" values are human values. Arabs want to be free and to govern themselves just as much as people in Europe and America do.

Parliament's vote, which was symbolic and has no legal standing, came as representatives of the two presidential rivals sought a solution in talks mediated by European envoys. Demonstrators jammed downtown Kiev in freezing weather for a sixth straight day, alleging the Nov. 21 vote was rigged and robbed their candidate, Viktor Yushchenko, of victory.

Thousands of demonstrators joined Yushchenko in demanding a new vote. A European Union envoy — Dutch Foreign Minister Ben Bot — said new elections were the "ideal outcome" for the standoff between Yushchenko and Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych, who was declared the winner by the Central Elections Commission.

Asked if new elections were the only solution, Ben Bot answered: "Yes."

The Unian news agency, citing Russia's RIA-Novosti, quoted Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman Alexander Yakovenko as saying Friday that Moscow regarded a potential revote favorably — an apparent significant retreat from its earlier insistence that the elections were fair and valid.

Parliament also passed a vote of no confidence in the elections commission, saying it "discredited itself" by declaring Yanukovych the winner by 3 percentage points.

The symbolic act apparently aligned the legislators with those wanting the results annulled. The Supreme Court will make the ultimate decision after hearing an appeal of the results by Yushchenko supporters Monday.

She is more than qualified. Once confirmed - and it's likely that will happen after four years as national security adviser, not to mention her foreign affairs service in George H.W. Bush's administration - she will be the first black woman to head the U.S. State Department, a position that should curry pride and congratulations.

Instead, Ms. Rice, who has a doctorate from the Graduate School of International Studies at the University of Denver, has been the subject of much ridicule that pokes fun at her race rather than her opinions. A white Wisconsin radio host described her and other blacks who work for the White House as servile. But some newspapers' cartoonists have gone over the top, too.

On Nov. 17 John Sylvester of WTDY-AM in Madison called Ms. Rice "Aunt Jemima." He also labeled Secretary of State Colin Powell an "Uncle Tom." The terms usually describe African-Americans who generally bow to try to please whites and who may seldom have much to do with other blacks. Normally we see the secretary of state and national security adviser in their official roles, and because their colleagues are predominantly white, that's who they are surrounded by.

In his first apology on Nov. 19, Mr. Sylvester said "It is with a heavy heart that I apologize this morning to Aunt Jemima. She wasn't a self-serving hack politician who got up in front of Congress and lied. Aunt Jemima didn't kowtow to Don Rumsfeld or Dick Cheney."

Besides the fact that the woman who posed as Aunt Jemima was born a slave named Nancy Green in 1834, she didn't know the secretary of defense or the vice president. But fine. Call Ms. Rice a "self-serving hack politician." Be mad at her. But don't call her Aunt Jemima. The radio host knows that's demeaning and that Ms. Rice's race has nothing to do with her abilities.

Apparently feeling the heat, Mr. Sylvester issued a second statement, but it was not with much semblance of remorse. On Monday, in letters to some newspapers, he said he was "concerned that I have offended many African-Americans by using a crass term to describe an incompetent, dishonest political appointee of the Bush Administration. I apologize." He added that Ms. Rice "has allowed herself to be used as a black trophy by an administration."

Oh, so now she's an object?

BERLIN, Nov 27 (Reuters) - Iran is working on a secret nuclear programme for military purposes despite promising the European Union it would halt all activities related to uranium enrichment, the news magazine Der Spiegel said on Saturday.

The magazine said it had obtained documents from an unnamed intelligence agency showing that Iran had dug a secret tunnel near an Isfahan facility preparing raw uranium for enrichment, even though operations there had been stopped.

Iran, which has repeatedly denied trying to develop nuclear weapons, promised the European Union on Nov. 14 it would halt all activities related to uranium enrichment, a process that creates atomic fuel for power plants or weapons.

It then demanded an exemption for some 20 enrichment centrifuges for research purposes, a move Western diplomats argued could torpedo the whole deal. They said Iranian officials in Vienna dropped the demand on Friday, but were waiting for a final decision from Tehran.

Biologists call these hybrid animals chimeras, after the mythical Greek creature with a lion's head, a goat's body and a serpent's tail. They are the products of experiments in which human stem cells were added to developing animal fetuses.

Chimeras are allowing scientists to watch, for the first time, how nascent human cells and organs mature and interact - not in the cold isolation of laboratory dishes but inside the bodies of living creatures. Some are already revealing deep secrets of human biology and pointing the way toward new medical treatments.

But with no federal guidelines in place, an awkward question hovers above the work: How human must a chimera be before more stringent research rules should kick in?

The National Academy of Sciences, which advises the federal government, has been studying the issue and hopes to make recommendations by February. Yet the range of opinions it has received so far suggests reaching consensus may be difficult.

Next time you go for a stroll on Mars, be sure you don't leave any litter behind. A plan to keep parts of the red planet in their pristine state could see seven areas turned into 'planetary parks', regulated just like national parks here on Earth.

The scheme has been proposed by Charles Cockell, a microbiologist for the British Antarctic Survey in Cambridge, and Gerda Horneck, an astrobiologist from the German Aerospace Centre in Cologne, Germany.

"It is the right of every person to stand and stare across the beautiful barrenness and desolation of the Martian surface without having to endure the eyesore of pieces of crashed spacecraft scattered across the landscape," they write in the latest edition of Space Policy.

"We've already crashed unmanned spacecraft there - Mars Polar Lander and possibly Beagle 2 - so there's already an environmental issue," Cockell told news@nature.com. He says the crashes are as irresponsible as dropping robots over the Antarctic.

Cockell and Horneck have mapped out seven different areas for conservation that contain representative features of the martian landscape.

The Polar Park would protect the planet's ice cap for biological studies, while Olympus Park would encompass the Solar System's largest volcano, Olympus Mons, to prevent future mountaineers despoiling it, as has happened with Mount Everest.

Others parks would cover desert areas, impressive meteorite craters and the landing sites of the Viking 1 and Mars Pathfinder spacecraft.

Where is the MSM on this! Hardly a yawn from them. I suppose after their whipping of the Marine in Fallujah shot a wounded Iraqi insurgent who was pretending to be dead two weeks ago, they don't Want to look like the hypocrites they are.

CENTCOM has a press release that has not generated any enthusiasm to date from the MSM folks:

FALLUJAH, Iraq - Marines from the 1st Marine Division shot and killed an insurgent, who while faking dead, opened fire on the Marines that were conducting a security and clearing patrol through the streets here at approximately 3:45 p.m. on 21 November.

For more information, please contact Capt Bradley Gordon, public affairs officer, 1st Marine Division, gordonbv@1mardivdm.usmc.mil

Well I hope they are not holding their breath waiting for the disinterested MSM to make many calls.

"Hundreds of thousands of the nation's sons are being slaughtered at the hands of the infidels because of your silence," Zarqawi said, in an audio tape posted on an Islamic Web site known as al-Qala'a, which has been a mailbox for Islamic militant groups.

"You have let us down in the darkest circumstances and handed us over to the enemy," the notorious mass murderer complained. "You have stopped supporting the holy warriors."
The finger-pointing tape from Zarqawi is the clearest indication yet that the U.S. offensive in Fallujah has been a massive success, and could be the beginning of a rout for terrorist forces in Iraq.

The tape reveals the Jordanian-born terrorist sounding desperate as he admits that his forces are "surrounded" by U.S. troops who are "cutting the throats of the holy warriors."

Congress has threatened to cut economic aid to governments that refuse to sign immunity accords shielding U.S. personnel from being surrendered to the International Criminal Court, the Washington Post reports.

"Armed hunters were no match for one person firing an SKS assault rifle," said Kristen Rand, VPC legislative director. "This sad incident illustrates why the SKS is also a leading cop-killing rifle in America today."

Rand pointed out that the SKS assault rifle was not covered by the recently expired 1994 federal assault weapons ban. The VPC criticized the 1994 law as inadequate and favors enactment of a tougher version of the law that would ban the SKS and many other assault weapons that easily slipped through the old law's loopholes.

Price: $969.99
This is the newer version of the BAR I bought 22 years ago for about $700.


Price: $88.95
This is the SKS used in the slayings.

Both guns are legal semi-automatic rifles. The Browning 7mm that I own is vastly more powerful than the SKS, and that is why it is much more popular with hunters.

Eat lots! and have a nice Thanksgiving day.

"It's a fact of American history that our founders were religious men, and to hide this fact from young fifth-graders in the name of political correctness is outrageous and shameful," said Williams' attorney, Terry Thompson.

"Williams wants to teach his students the true history of our country," he said. "There is nothing in the Establishment Clause (of the U.S. Constitution) that prohibits a teacher from showing students the Declaration of Independence."

[snip]

Among the materials she has rejected, according to Williams, are excerpts from the Declaration of Independence, George Washington's journal, John Adams' diary, Samuel Adams' "The Rights of the Colonists" and William Penn's "The Frame of Government of Pennsylvania."

"He hands out a lot of material and perhaps 5 to 10 percent refers to God and Christianity because that's what the founders wrote," said Thompson, a lawyer for the Alliance Defense Fund, which advocates for religious freedom. "The principal seems to be systematically censoring material that refers to Christianity and it is pure discrimination."

Article [I.]

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; [emphasis added] or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

The courts have actually approved this "Establishment" violation here (PDF).

Give me a f***ing break. Children can't even utter the word "Jesus" in a classroom, but they can not only utter Allah, but must memorize many verses in the Koran, pray in the name of Allah?

Also posted and discussed at Deans World.

FALLUJAH, Iraq — Sgt. Rafael Peralta built a reputation as a man who always put his Marines' interests ahead of his own.

He showed that again, when he made the ultimate sacrifice of his life Tuesday, by shielding his fellow Marines from a grenade blast.

"It's stuff you hear about in boot camp, about World War II and Tarawa Marines who won the Medal of Honor," said Lance Cpl. Rob Rogers, 22, of Tallahassee, Fla., one of Peralta's platoon mates in 1st Platoon, Alpha Company, 1st Battalion, 3rd Marine Regiment.

Peralta, 25, as platoon scout, wasn't even assigned to the assault team that entered the insurgent safe house in northern Fallujah, Marines said. Despite an assignment that would have allowed him to avoid such dangerous duty, he regularly asked squad leaders if he could join their assault teams, they said.

One of the first Marines to enter the house, Peralta was wounded in the face by rifle fire from a room near the entry door, said Lance Cpl. Adam Morrison, 20, of Tacoma, who was in the house when Peralta was first wounded.

Moments later, an insurgent rolled a fragmentation grenade into the area where a wounded Peralta and the other Marines were seeking cover.

As Morrison and another Marine scrambled to escape the blast, pounding against a locked door, Peralta grabbed the grenade and cradled it into his body, Morrison said. While one Marine was badly wounded by shrapnel from the blast, the Marines said they believe more lives would have been lost if not for Peralta's selfless act.

"He saved half my fire team," said Cpl. Brannon Dyer, 27, of Blairsville, Ga.

The Marines said such a sacrifice would be perfectly in character for Peralta, a Mexico native who lived in San Diego and gained U.S. citizenship after joining the Marines.

The elitist eco-hypocrites of San Francisco have a new weapon in their never-ending attack on poor people: Now they want to tax grocery bags at 17 cents a pop.

"The measure is primarily being pushed by environmentalists who view plastic grocery bags as a menace, not as a modern marvel of convenience," USA Today reported today.

Of course, 17 cents a bag won't mean anything to the Lexus leftists, but it's just another slap in the face of those who already struggle to scrape by in the expensive city in the expensive state.

Well: here's another cultural explanation. A large part of the pro-Bush vote - especially among blue state residents - was a vote against the left elite and the cultural attitudes it represents in the public imagination. It was a vote not so much for Bush or his often religious policies (or even the war on terror), but against the post 9/11 left, against Michael Moore and political correctness and Susan Sontag and CBS News, among a host of others. I have to say that this was the most appealing thing about George W. Bush for me. If he hadn't so obviously screwed up the Iraq war and endorsed a constitutional amendment against gay rights, I would have succumbed myself.

You nailed it, dude. You just fucking nailed it. I grew up in redneck America - John Ashcroft's hometown, no less - but I've been a chai latte-drinking, Times-reading, wine-scrutinizing-metro-scum pig living in the northeast ever since I got my law degree ten years ago. So I think I know "both sides" of this country pretty darned well. The Democrats didn't lose this election because of the GOP's gay bashing - the polls bear that out. And they didn't lose because 51% of Americans are cross-wielding bigots who want to roll back our civilization to the fourteenth century. Follow the principle of Occam's Razor - all things equal, the simplest explanation is the best. As applied here, that means the Democrats were not entrusted with the keys to the White House because there were just too many Americans who don't like and don't trust the Democratic Party. That's why they lost this election. That's why GOP voter id equaled - for the first time ever - Democratic voter id. That's why Daschle lost his Senate race. That's why the GOP has six more Senate seats than it did 25 months ago.
Let me say it again - the Democrats lost because they are not liked and they are not trusted. That, and really nothing else, was the verdict of this election. And for what it's worth, shitting all over the 61 million pitchfork-wielding imbeciles who didn't vote for them probably isn't their path back out of the wilderness, emotionally gratifying though it may be."

Tell it to the Marines

Hayward - A Minnesota truck driver confronted for hunting on private land opened fire on mostly unarmed hunters and then picked off others as they rushed to the bloody scene to help, officials said Monday.

A sixth victim died Monday of wounds suffered in the shooting.

Chai Soua Vang, 36, a St. Paul resident and former soldier who is married with six children, was arrested five hours after the shooting Sunday.

Vang, who hasn't been charged, was being held Monday in the Sawyer County Jail. Vang, who is Hmong, speaks English well and was cooperating but hadn't admitted to the shooting, authorities said.

[...]

Those killed Sunday in the remote Wisconsin woods were Robert Crotteau, 42; his son, Joey Crotteau, 20; Al Laski, 43; Mark Roidt, 28; and Jessica Willers, 27.

The injured were Terry Willers, 47, Jessica Willers' father; Denny Drew, 55; and Lauren Hesebeck, 48. Hesebeck and Drew are brothers-in-law. Officials did not identify which of the injured hunters died Monday.

They were part of a group of 14 or 15 hunters continuing an annual tradition. All of the victims were from the Rice Lake area or had connections there, and their deaths shocked the city of 8,300.

[...]

Vang climbed up the tree stand. Terry Willers discovered him, radioed to Crotteau at their cabin a quarter mile away and then approached Vang and asked him to leave, Meier said.

Vang got down from the stand, walked about 40 yards, took the scope off the SKS semi-automatic rifle he was carrying and began firing at the hunters, Meier said.

Terry Willers was the first to be shot. As he lay wounded, he radioed to others that they were under fire, Meier said.

One of the hunters read the hunting registration number pinned to Vang's back and wrote it in the dust on an all-terrain vehicle. Another called 911.

According to Meier, some of the hunters began to run away and some may have tried to fire back at Vang, but there was only one gun among them out in the woods.

Vang was walking around the woods, firing on the hunters, he said.

"They grabbed who they could grab because they were still under fire," he said.

As more hunters came, Vang continued to fire, Meier said. He shot some of the hunters more than once, he said. At least three of the victims were shot from 50 yards or more, a doctor who treated them said.

Laski and Jessica Willers, who were back at the cabin, headed to the scene unarmed, Meier said. Vang shot and killed the pair as they rode in on an ATV, he said.

Vang disappeared into the woods as eight hunters lay bleeding and another half-dozen or so in their hunting party cared for the wounded. Bodies were scattered over a 100-square-yard area.

Falluja has been a one-sided battle, and we have had one-sided news coverage to go with it. We've become accustomed to the first part of this. From Operation Desert Storm in 1991 onwards, through the invasion and occupation of Iraq to the reinvasion of Falluja last week, the world has come to accept the Pentagon war-fighting doctrine of overwhelming force as normal.

I wonder, though, whether we might be in danger of accepting the one-sided coverage of Falluja, the invasion and occupation of Iraq and, yes, the global so-called war on terror as normal too.

In the ideological and military clash of Christian fundamentals with Islamist fundamentals, the western media are simply off-limits to the latter. I am still getting emails every week from viewers demanding why we are not in Falluja, Tikrit, Amara covering this war properly and showing the other side.

[snip]

Meanwhile, Fleet Street's most battle-scarred must be champing to get in there - but they also want to keep heads on shoulders [Genius Alex, but so obvious] and avoid the pitiless orange jumpsuit and video execution.

It's what one would expect from Robert Fisk or dozens of other European journalists. Or, for that matter, from writers for liberal U.S. magazines such as the Nation or Harper's, which have long seen our claims to have a noble, moral foreign policy as a ruse to cover up brutal Realpolitik.

But it's not the sort of public declaration one would expect from a high-profile reporter for the most powerful American newspaper -- especially at a time when that paper, which insists it's a champion of thoughtful, nonpartisan journalism, faces more criticism than ever that it's often an echo chamber for strident liberalism.

That's why even now -- after Howell Raines, after years of bile from Paul Krugman and Maureen Dowd, even after the attempt to turn an old missing-explosives story into an election-eve bombshell -- it was astounding to hear Chris Hedges of the New York Times go off Saturday morning at a forum held here as part of the annual conference of the Association of Opinion Page Editors.

Hedges was invited to talk about his book, War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning. Many editors on hand were probably aware of Hedges' notoriety for a commencement address he gave in May 2003 at a small Illinois college in which he was booed off the stage for criticizing the war on Iraq. But no one expected Hedges to offer up an indictment of American foreign policy as sweeping and angry as our strongest Arab critics or nastiest MIT linguistics professor.

"We're absolutely reviled around the world, as we should be," Hedges said. "Our only friends are war criminals" -- a reference, he explained, to Ariel Sharon and Vladimir Putin.

America's amoral, bloodthirsty ways and the hate they generate would be much plainer to the American people, Hedges said, if only so many journalists weren't "trapped" by the government's war clichés and oriented to a Washington-centric view of the world. This group, he said, included his bosses at the Times.

"There was absolutely no interest in my newspaper in presenting the views of the French" as the U.S. moved toward war in Iraq, Hedges said. Instead, there was lots of guffawing over anti-French jokes, which he termed "racist."

Who knew? The New York Times' newsroom is a place where mockery of France is so severe that a heroic, hardy, death-defying war correspondent would consider it tantamount to workplace harassment.

They said they immediately called the Suffolk County police, but by the time officers arrived, rain had doused the fire. The police removed the cross, which was three feet tall and made from the slats of a picket fence. By yesterday afternoon, the only remaining trace was a charred circle of grass outside the building, a two-family house in the southwest corner of Lake Grove.

Detective Sgt. Robert Reecks said that the police and the F.B.I. were investigating the incident as a hate crime, but that there were no suspects.

It was the county's first cross-burning since 1998, when a black family in Amityville returned home from church and found a burning cross on their lawn.

The Lake Grove home is a modest green split-level occupied by the couple, who rent the first floor, and another family upstairs.

The couple, who were not identified by the police, said that they had known each other for 30 years, had been married for 22 years and had lived in the house for 8. But they said that yesterday was the first time they felt attacked because of their relationship. The wife is white, and the husband is black.

WARNING: Violent graphic scenes.

America's agenda-setting press has been quite impressed by the thugs who have been targeting, kidnapping, and murdering defenseless Iraqi civilians. A front-page headline out of Iraq in Friday's New York Times, for example, reads, "Showing Their Resolve, Rebels Mount Attacks in Northern and Central Iraq."

Got that? These murderers have been demonstrating "resolve." Indeed, throughout the battle of Fallujah and in the battles that have followed, American journalists have discovered many impressive attributes in these criminals. According to a week of major-press stories, the "insurgents" are a cunning and courageous band who have been putting up a tenacious struggle.

Here's an alternative headline the Times' staff might have considered: "Showing Their Resolve, Rebels Terrorize Families, Target Children, Disembowel Women, Behead the Elderly."

That's the true nature of the "resolve" these "rebels" have shown. And besides, who anointed these monsters as the defenders of Iraq's sovereign honor? "Rebels" may fit neatly enough in a headline, but these blood-drenched thugs have been waging their war against Iraqi civilians, not on their behalf. Of course, the Iraqi civilians that really interest the U.S. press are generally those who have been killed or injured by U.S. forces.

WASHINGTON -- Congress acted Friday to block state and local governments from taxing connections that link consumers to the Internet for the next three years.

"Enacting this legislation is a big win for the majority of American Internet users," House Judiciary Committee Chairman James Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., said as the House passed the bill by voice vote Friday and sent it to the president for his signature.

The Senate made adjustments to the bill this week that freed the tax prohibition from a yearlong stalemate and pushed it toward passage.

The bill blocks taxation of all types of Internet connections, from traditional dial-up services to high-speed broadband lines.

States that had started taxing Internet access before the first ban, enacted in 1998, can continue collecting those fees. One exception is Wisconsin, which must drop its taxes in 2006 at Sensenbrenner's insistence.

The original ban didn't envision the invention of speedy DSL lines, and the law would require the few states that now tax those connections to phase out their levies.

"We have slammed the door on the people who want to stick it to DSL," Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., told reporters after the House passed the bill.

This morning, I pull out of the bldg garage, make my left to drive the 3 blocks to 395. I'm just passing the corner where KatRikk* used to live, & I see on the left an old man sitting on the curb. I couldn't tell if he was just resting, or had fallen, but since there was a bus stop full of people 1/2 block away on the right, I thought they would have noticed if he had fallen.

*KatRikk = our friends, Kat and Rikk

I drove another block, saw in my rear view that he was still sitting, and turned around. Something just didn't look right. I turned onto the street where he was, & asked if he was ok. He said, "I don't think so.", so I did a u-turn to get to his side of the street. As I was doing my u-turn, a guy from that bldg walked over and started talking to the old man. I got out of my car, and checked on him. He lives in my bldg, & was walking to the bus stop a couple of blocks further down the road. He had stepped off the curb and fell. He wasn't sure he could get up, but felt that if he could, he would be ok. He was on his way to the bus for a doctor's appt. I offered to drive him down to his bus stop, and the other guy helped me to pick him up and get the old man into my car.

As he gets in, I noticed he had scraped his inner right forearm up, and it was bleeding. He insisted he was ok, and could make it to the doctor. I gave him some napkins to wipe up his arm. As we start down towards the other bus stop, the people at the one almost directly across from him are just standing there, pretending nothing was happening!!!!!

I get him to his bus stop, help him out of the car and onto the bench. Thankfully, there was another man there who would help him onto the bus. The old man gave me a peck on the cheek, and called me a "Gentleman and a scholar"!

I'm still fuming that those asswipes at the bus station up the street didn't do anything. I have no idea how long he was sitting there on that curb and they did nothing!!!! An 82 year old man doesn't just sit down on the curb in the middle of frelling November!!!! WTF is wrong with them?!?!?!?

Check out the great slide show from USA Today capturing some great photos of our great military in action.

God bless them and bring them home safe.

As one of your constituents, I must express to you my profound disappointment and dismay with the performance of Judge Joseph T. Carter in Dakota County. In a decision earlier this year, Judge Carter granted custody of three little girls to Justin Paul Farnsworth, who lived with the girls' mother. At the time, both Judge Carter and the court-appointed investigator, David Jaehne, knew that Farnsworth was a registered sex offender who had raped a 13-year-old girl ten years earlier. Despite this information, Judge Carter granted custody to Farnsworth of not only the youngest two, who are his daughters, but also the oldest, a 9-year-old unrelated to Farnworth at all.

As almost anyone but a family court judge could have guessed, Farnsworth repeatedly raped and abused the 9-year-old for months until she was rescued by a neighbor.

Judge Carter failed to follow Minnesota state law requiring judges to appoint a guardian ad litem for the children during the custody process. The abandonment of the children by the mother and the sex-offender status of the petitioner should have demonstrated an obvious need for an advocate to speak on behalf of the three girls. His failure to follow the law as well as to apply any standard of common sense disqualifies him for the bench, in my view, if not from the Bar altogether.

Any man with a shred of honor would resign his post under these circumstances. If Judge Carter does not act with honor, I urge you to initiate impeachment proceedings against Judge Joseph T. Carter. We must not wait until he allows more children to be raped and abused before removing him from his office.

Thank you for your attention to this serious matter.

MADISON, Wis. -- A radio talk show host who called Condoleezza Rice an "Aunt Jemima" issued an apology Friday, but not to Rice.

"It is with a heavy heart that I apologize this morning to Aunt Jemima," John "Sly" Sylvester said on WTDY-AM in Madison. "She wasn't a self-serving hack politician who got up in front of Congress and lied. Aunt Jemima didn't kowtow to Don Rumsfeld or Dick Cheney."

Sylvester made his comments in conjunction with a giveaway of Aunt Jemima pancake mix and syrup to listeners.

[...]

Sylvester told listeners he would resign if his employer lost advertisers or was hurt by the uproar over his comments.

He said Aunt Jemima was really a "strong, independent black woman" named Nancy Green. Born a slave in Kentucky, Green was hired in the 1890s to advertise the pancake mix.

"Aunt Jemima never lied about yellow cake uranium, she just makes a damn good pancake," Sylvester said.

AUBURN HILLS, Mich. - Indiana's Ron Artest and Stephen Jackson charged into the stands and fought with fans in the final minute of their game against the Detroit Pistons on Friday night, forcing an early end to the Pacers' 97-82 win.

The game was stopped with 45.9 seconds remaining when a pushing and shoving between the teams spilled into the stands after fans began throwing things at the players near the scorer's table.

California's high taxes and obsession with elitist political correctness have made the state so expensive that a fourth of residents are thinking about moving to a more reasonable state.

As greedy cities, counties and other governmental bodies restrict property rights and development in the name of environmentalism, housing has become prohibitively overpriced.

The young are especially hard hit. A study released today by Public Policy Institute of California found that:

• 60 percent of respondents worry that their children will not be able to buy homes nearby.

• Only one in five who want someday to buy a house think they will be able to.

• Nearly half of respondents under 35 say they are considering leaving.

Instead of being optimistic about life in the former Golden State, the new generation "coming into the owning stages of their lives ... are exactly the people who are talking about moving elsewhere," warned Mark Baldassare, author of the statewide study. "You're talking about your work force. You're talking about your future."

The median price of a house nationwide is $186,600. In California it's $465,000.

Sly, the on-air name for John Sylvester, told WTDY-AM (1670) morning show listeners that Rice, who is black, bought her way into the White House with obedience to President Bush.

"I'm not apologizing for what I said," Sylvester said Thursday in an interview. "I stand by it.

"I was aiming that directly at a black person that is letting himself (and herself) be used by an administration that has been extremely hostile to minorities," he said.

"Being subservient and being a black role model are two different things. I think (Rice) has not only been bad for the country and for national security, but I think she's been a bad black role model.

Response was negative, from Wisconsin Democratic U.S. Sen. Russ Feingold to Madison Mayor Dave Cieslewicz and the Urban League of Greater Madison. Sylvester has been intensely supportive of Feingold and Wisconsin Democrats in general.

Linda Hoskins of the NAACP's Madison branch said she could not comment on Sylvester's remarks until she had heard them in their entirety.

The station's corporate office received about 100 calls about his comments, Sylvester said.

He added that he has a long history of commitment to civil rights and has supported Madison's black community.

He said he was planning a giveaway on Friday's show of Aunt Jemima pancake mix and syrup. "I will apologize to Aunt Jemima," he said.

The incident came after a radio host in Milwaukee had his talk show taken off the air all of last week after he used word "wetback" to refer to undocumented Mexican immigrants, sparking protests from Hispanics.

On both sides, discourse now moves swiftly from disagreement into demonizing, from contrast to caricature. The worst motives are always assumed. Both camps have polemicists who win popularity, ratings, and book sales by devising ever more clever ways of ripping the eyelids off their opponents. We all know the visceral satisfactions of hanging out with our home-team blogs and watching the TV or radio stations that fit our worldview. Our politicians and pundits happily supply us with the voodoo dolls and the pins. But we'd be smarter not to use them.

I’m not saying the conflicting values aren’t profound and important. But I am saying that if we choose to find the legitimate underpinnings of our ideological opponents' arguments, we can. It may not be as much fun, but it is more patriotic.

COLUMBUS, Ohio - Election officials in one Ohio county found that about 2,600 ballots were double-counted, and two other counties have discovered possible cases of people voting twice in the presidential election.

Prosecutors were trying to determine Wednesday whether charges should be filed against a couple in Madison County accused of voting twice. In addition, Summit County election workers investigated possible double votes found under 18 names.

In the other case, Sandusky County election officials discovered that about 2,600 ballots from nine precincts were counted twice, likely because of worker error, elections director Barb Tuckerman said.

The couple who voted twice in Madison County cast absentee ballots in October, then voted in person on Election Day, county elections director Gloria Herrel said. The couple said election workers told them their absentee votes were lost, prosecutor Steve Pronai said.

In Summit county, typically the votes were made by absentee ballot or in person, and then a second vote was cast with a provisional ballot in another precinct, elections director Bryan Williams said.

Under Ohio law, people who vote twice could be charged with election fraud, falsification or illegal voting, according the Secretary of State's Office. The maximum penalty for the most severe charge is 18 months in prison.

As the Salvation Army kicks off its annual red-kettle program today, a growing number of retailers, from Best Buy to Target, are banning Salvation Army bell ringers from their doors -- to avoid having to choose between competing charities and out of concern for customers, they say.

That's created a schism in the retail world, with rival chains banking on kettle-carrying volunteers to set them apart as more civic-minded.

They issued a statement claiming that Target has always had a no-solicitations rule, and that they found it difficult to make an exception for the Salvation Army. I appreciate Target's rule on solicitors; I find it annoying to be accosted by the rainbow of nutbar causes and con artists that accost shoppers elsewhere. However, lumping the Salvation Army in with the rest of the hucksters stretches credulity. The Salvation Army, as Hugh pointed out, has the lowest overhead and supports the most heartbreaking cases of any major charity group, making them not only the first such organization but also the best. You never hear about Salvation Army management keeping Upper West Side lovenests with donor money, as happened with another national charity a few years ago -- one that regularly enlists corporate management to extort donations through payroll deductions.

"Please take this as our official notice that we will not be shopping at TARGET this Holiday (CHRISTMAS) Season. Additionally, we have told 10 of our friends about this, who in turn will tell 10 of their friends who in turn will tell ……..well you get the message. Even though your store is a little bit closer and more convenient, my family and I will make the little extra effort to visit our neighborhood WALMART store.

Oh, by the way, SEASONS GREETINGS AND A MERRY CHRISTMAS TO YOU AND ALL OF YOUR EMPLOYEES who are against this policy (of which I am sure there are many)"

Big Lots
BJ's Wholesale Club Inc
AutoZone Inc
Books-A-Million Inc
Wal-Mart

Home Depot Inc
Barnes & Noble Inc
Circuit City Stores Inc
Caldor Corp

UPDATE: Hugh Hewitt also writes in his article that there will be a link to www.dontshoptarget.com up sometime later today.

I'm not sorry that George W. Bush was reelected President.
I'm not sorry for being American.
I'm not sorry for being a Soldier.
I'm not sorry for the opportunity to serve my country.
I'm not sorry for democracy in action.
I'm not sorry for Freedom, and mostly the freedom to express myself.

I would not be sorry if John Kerry were elected president.
I would still not be sorry of being an American if he was.

If you don't notice, my picture speaks for myself and myself only. I'm not speaking for the 51% of american voters who chose to vote for Bush. Their reasons are not the same as mine. I'm not speaking against the 48% of voters who chose to vote for Kerry. They had the freedom to vote the way they did. I do not ever wish for that to go away. My words are simple, blunt, and to the point.

I am not Sorry.

In his address, Scalia talked about originalism, explaining the concept of strict interpretation of the Constitution.

"In the last 40 years ... we've become fond of the phrase that we have a living document. But if something is wrong, then change the law or change the Constitution, but don't re interpret the Constitution." He said proponents of the living document concept and flexibility regarding the Constitution are "dead wrong. "

He also said the Constitution doesn't say anything about such issues as abortion rights and assisted suicide, and that those who are for or against such measures should work toward passing laws that support their views.

1. Blue state per capita incomes are higher (lots higher) than red state per capita incomes. Blue state costs of living are also higher (by quite a lot) than red state costs. This insures that higher-income people will tend to stay in those states, while lower- and middle-income people tend to leave. Indeed, blue states are losing population, as recorded in this August 2003 column by the Wall Street Journal's Daniel Henninger.

2. In blue states, you find the oldest cities in America, those cities formed of the nexus between railroads and harbors. The newest of those cities, Detroit, began about 80 years ago and almost immediately began to explode -- another subject, of course; those cities are now relics.

3. Those old cities host most of the oldest cultural institutions -- universities, publishing companies, museums and galleries, theaters, corporate headquarters, stock and bond markets, what is now called "the media." If you want to get famous or make a lot of money, you leave the red states and go live in a blue city. Having the best rock and roll band in Nebraska doesn't mean much. Having the best band in New York City is a big, big deal. No argument.

What would our blue state friends have us do as a nation to even out this "subsidization"? Get rid of the "progressive" income tax and implement a flat tax?

Deal.

Called the Fish Empathy Project, the campaign reflects a strategy shift by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals as it challenges a diet component widely viewed as nutritious and uncontroversial.

"No one would ever put a hook through a dog's or cat's mouth," said Bruce Friedrich, PETA's director of vegan outreach. "Once people start to understand that fish, although they come in different packaging, are just as intelligent, they'll stop eating them."

No, I wouldn't put a hook in my dog's mouth, but then I don't plan on eating her either, and if I did, I could find an easier way to catch her, like maybe a short "whistle".

From PETA's Fishing Hurts page: "Have you ever seen a fish gasping for breath when you take it out of the water? They’re saying, ‘Thanks a lot for killing me. It feels great, you know.’ No! It hurts!"

Yes, and so does my sides hurt from laughing so hard.

On Another Fishing Hurts page, PETA warns me: "Like the flesh of other animals, fish flesh contains excessive amounts of protein, fat, and cholesterol."

Ok then, so then why does my doctor tell me to eat fish twice a week for my heart? What to do, what to do... do I believe PETA, or do I believe my doctor?

UPDATE: After further review I believe I recognize someone in the CNN story photo: Isn't that fish pictured whith Bruce Friedrich and Karin Robertson "Charlie Tuna" without his hat and glasses? I wonder if StarKist has approved this.

On a more serious matter, some Democrats who are determined to oppose President Bush's proposal for reforming Social Security are going to make a politically dangerous, because condescending, argument. As part of his "ownership society" agenda, Bush wants to give individuals the choice of investing a portion of their Social Security taxes in retirement accounts they would own—personal stock portfolios. This is a complex proposal, with large transition costs—a matter about which people can intelligently disagree.

(Or unintelligently: The New York Times, continuing in campaign mode and accelerating its transformation from a newspaper into an advocacy institution, last Friday carried this headline: AARP OPPOSES BUSH PLAN TO REPLACE SOCIAL SECURITY WITH PRIVATE ACCOUNTS. But he has no plan to "replace" Social Security.)

However, some Democrats may oppose Bush's plan on the ground that it presupposes more intelligence than the average American possesses—that the average American cannot be trusted to invest competently. So part of the "pro choice" party believes that the average American should not be trusted to make choices about providing for his or her retirement.

Belief in the infantilism of the American public has been an expanding facet of some "progressive" thinking for 50 years—since the explosive growth of advertising, especially on television, in the 1950s. Then it began to be argued (see, for example, John Kenneth Galbraith's 1958 book "The Affluent Society") that Americans are a bovine, manipulable herd—putty in the hands of advertisers who can manufacture demand for whatever products manufacturers want to produce.

I agree with Will, but think that something else is at work too. As I argued here, the deepest urge of many liberals is to prove their intellectual and moral superiority. One of the ways they accomplish this is by eschewing obvious explanations for misconduct -- greed, cruelty, or (in extreme cases) evil -- as too simplistic. Liberals would rather identify "root causes," as if the basic motivations just mentioned are insufficiently rooted. And the root causes that satisfy liberals generally turn out to be flaws in America and its policies. Such liberals thus are able to trash the American public coming and going, as too simple-minded to focus on root causes and, ultimately, as the root cause itself. President Bush can be viewed as the representative of this cartoon version of the public. No public figure seems less inclined to worry about the things liberals deem root causes, and few public figures have more vigorously pursued the kinds of polcies that constitute the alleged root causes of our woes. No wonder they hate him.

NASA on Monday was to attempt to set an air speed record when it launches its pilotless X-43A "scramjet." Related reading
Geeks in space Paul Allen was first. Amazon's Jeff Bezos is in the wings. Why do tech luminaries want off Earth?

The X-43A was to try to reach 7,000 mph, or 10 times the speed of sound (Mach 10), over U.S. naval airspace off the coast of Los Angeles. The launch was to be the third and last of a series, coming eight months after the NASA aircraft reached nearly 5,000 mph in March. Its first launch in June 2001 was aborted when a rocket booster went out of control.

NASA planned to launch the craft around 1 p.m. PT. If the weather was poor, the launch was to be rescheduled to Tuesday

GREENSBURG, La. (AP) - It was probably the world's richest beaver dam. Beavers found a bag of bills stolen from a video poker casino last week, tore it open and wove the money into the sticks and brush of their dam on a creek north of Louisiana Highway 48. Major Michael Martin of the East Feliciana Parish Sheriff's Office says bills used to build the dam were still whole.

The money was part of 70- to 75-thousand dollars taken from the Lucky Dollar Casino in Greensburg. About 40-thousand dollars was recovered. Authorities expect to find the rest in a safety deposit box at a bank in Mississippi.

LIMASSOL, Cyprus - An American researcher claimed Sunday to have discovered the remains of the legendary lost city of Atlantis on the bottom of the east Mediterranean Sea, but Cyprus' chief government archaeologist was skeptical.

Robert Sarmast said sonar scanning 50 miles southeast of Cyprus revealed man-made walls, one as long as 2 miles, and trenches at a depth of 1,640 yards.

"It is a miracle we found these walls as their location and lengths match exactly the description of the acropolis of Atlantis provided by Plato in his writings," Sarmast said, referring to the ancient Greek philosopher.

The chief government archaeologist of Cyprus, Pavlos Flourentzos, reacted with skepticism, telling The Associated Press: "More proof is necessary."

Sarmast, 38, is an architect by training from Los Angeles. He has devoted the past 2 1/2 years to trying to locate the lost city described by Plato in his dialogues, the Timaeous and the Critias. He spoke to reporters on the "Flying Enterprise," his expeditionary ship, after six days of taking highly sophisticated "side scan" sonars of the seabed.

He said he had chosen the area from data provided by two earlier sonar scans of the east Mediterranean by Russian and French expeditions. His own expedition used more sophisticated equipment, he said.

"We found more than 60-70 points that are a perfect match with Plato's detailed description of the general layout of the acropolis hill of Atlantis. The match of the dimensions and the coordinates provided by our sonar with Plato's description are so accurate that, if this is not indeed the acropolis of Atlantis, then this is the world's greatest coincidence," he said.

Second Amendment supporters are pleased that the Illinois state Senate has voted 40-18 to override the governor's veto of a self-defense bill.

The bill, SB 2161, would exempt citizens from prosecution under local gun ordinances, in cases where they use a firearm to defend themselves or their families.

The bill was inspired by the case of Hale DeMar, a resident of Wilmette charged with violating a city ban on handguns after he shot and wounded a man who broke into his house.

"In the case of Mr. DeMar, the man he shot had burglarized his home two nights in a row. Wilmette's foolish handgun ban didn't stop that thug from entering the DeMar home."

Waldron [Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms (CCRKBA) Executive Director] noted that Wilmette, an upper-middle-class suburb of Chicago, was one of several communities in Illinois to enact handgun bans, which "haven't stopped a single crime."


"Illinois residents deserve protection from stupid local ordinances that essentially make them criminals for defending themselves," he added.

Junk food adverts will be banished beyond the 9pm watershed an attempt to fight Britain’s obesity crisis, it emerged tonight.

A ban during children’s TV had been widely expected when the Government produces its health White Paper next week.

But Health Secretary Dr John Reid is set to go further after Ofcom figures showed 70% of viewing by children aged four to 15 takes place between 6pm and 9pm.

Dr Reid will threaten food manufacturers and advertisers with legislation if they fail to agree a voluntary code.

Starting a war on a weekend is breach of international law, regardless of UN approval.

Xbox owning countries may only invade non-Xbox owning countries if they bring enough for everyone.

If you're captured by the enemy, you can still use the phone to vote for American Idol.

If your country is financing another country's war via large trade deficits, and you condemn it, your country is required to buy the booze for the next UN kegger.


It is an atrocity punishable by life imprisonment to use chemical weapons. It is an atrocity punishable by 'sacking' to use the smell from the Comfy Lounge as a weapon.

It is prefectly legal to start a war if the leader of the opposing country is talking smack about your woman.

If a spy is caught in another country before he/she actually does anything evil, they have to wear a dunce cap all the way back to their own country.

It is not acceptable to humiliate prisoners. However, if they voluntarily streak through the prison draped in your country's flag, you have to let them go, no questions asked.

If your start a war, then get kicked out of office in the next election, every citizen in the country you just invaded is entitled to spank you once.

When oil fields are being divided up among allied countries, the first one to call 'shotgun' gets first pick.

Ian W. MacKinnon

In 1994, when the Gingrich revolution swept Republicans into power, ending 40 years of Democratic hegemony in the House, the mainstream press needed to account for this inversion of the Perfect Order of Things. A myth was born. Explained the USA Today headline: "ANGRY WHITE MEN: Their votes turn the tide for GOP."

Overnight, the revolution of the Angry White Male became conventional wisdom. In the 10 years before the 1994 election there were 56 mentions of angry white men in the media, according to LexisNexis. In the next seven months there were more than 1,400.

Plus ca change ... Ten years and another stunning Democratic defeat later, and liberals are at it again. The Angry White Male has been transmuted into the Bigoted Christian Redneck.

In the post-election analyses, the liberal elite, led by the holy trinity of the New York Times -- Paul Krugman, Thomas Friedman and Maureen Dowd -- just about lost its mind denouncing the return of medieval primitivism. As usual, Dowd achieved the highest level of hysteria, cursing the Republicans for pandering to "isolationism, nativism, chauvinism, puritanism and religious fanaticism" in their unfailing drive to "summon our nasty devils."

Whence comes this fable? With President Bush increasing his share of the vote among Hispanics, Jews, women (especially married women), Catholics, seniors and even African Americans, on what does this victory-of-the-homophobic-evangelical voter rest?

Its origins lie in a single question in the Election Day exit poll. The urban myth grew around the fact that "moral values" ranked highest in the answer to Question J: "Which ONE issue mattered most in deciding how you voted for president?"

Look at the choices:

• Education, 4 percent.
• Taxes, 5 percent.
• Health Care, 8 percent.
• Iraq, 15 percent.
• Terrorism, 19 percent.
• Economy and Jobs, 20 percent.
• Moral Values, 22 percent.

"Moral values" encompass abortion, gay marriage, Hollywood's influence, the general coarsening of the culture and, for some, the morality of preemptive war. The way to logically pit this class of issues against the others would be to pit it against other classes: "war issues" or "foreign policy issues" (Iraq plus terrorism) and "economic issues" (jobs, taxes, health care, etc).

If you pit group against group, the moral values class comes in dead last: war issues at 34 percent, economic issues variously described at 33 percent and moral values at 22 percent -- i.e., they are at least a third less salient than the others.

Ah, yes. But the fallback is then to attribute Bush's victory to the gay marriage referendums that pushed Bush over the top, particularly in Ohio.

This is more nonsense. George Bush increased his vote in 2004 over 2000 by an average of 3.1 percent nationwide. In Ohio the increase was 1 percent -- less than a third of the national average. In the 11 states in which the gay marriage referendums were held, Bush increased his vote by less than he did in the 39 states that did not have the referendum. The great anti-gay surge was pure fiction.

[W]ith their bitter defeat in 2004, Democrats are now undeniably a minority party in opposition. Opposition can be fruitful or barren. In 1992 Clinton's victory gave Democrats control of the White House and Congress in a divided nation, but Newt Gingrich and the right unleashed a relentless opposition, rallied their base and put forth a national agenda, the Contract With America, to win the 1994 Congressional elections. After Clinton demoralized his base with NAFTA, electrified the right over gays in the military and tax increases, and failed to deliver on healthcare, Republicans swept Democrats out of their majority in both houses of Congress for the first time in forty years.

In contrast, after Bush stole the election in 2000, demoralized Democrats rolled over on his tax cuts, authorized Bush to make war on Iraq, offered no unified critique of his failed economics and had no national message in the by-elections. Bush led Republicans to gains in both houses by nationalizing the election, impugning his opponents' patriotism and developing the mobilization strategies that proved so effective this year.

In the coming months, progressives can drive the response to Bush's victory, just as the right drove the response to Clinton's. Thus we must take a close look at 2004, what we can build on and where we should go.

"We didn't even know he was in the hospital until he called us from Laurel Ridge himself," a woman we'll refer to as "Magdalana" tells us. We're disguising her name in order to protect the identity of her six year old grandson she's referring to.

She says he was confined to a psychiatric hospital following a temper tantrum when he called his grandmother for help.

"I mean he was like," Magdalana describes, "maybe you could say he looked more like a zombie."

News 4 WOAI Trouble Shooter Tanji Patton asks, "How could you tell by looking at him that he was on medication?" Magdalana answers, "His attitude, his eyes, his way of speech. All that."

Magdalana says a nurse confirmed her fears. Her grandchild was on 2 different psychotropic or mind-altering drugs, plus benadryl to help him sleep. As it turns out, Magdalana's grandchild isn't alone.

A sampling of state records released by the State Comptroller's office shows two out of three foster kids in texas appear to be on psychotropic meds. The Medicaid prescription records are from November of last year and show that many kids are taking two or more of these drugs.

At the risk of losing her job, a Child Protective Services worker spoke to the Trouble Shooters following a hearing by State Rep. Carlos Uresti last month. She talked about one child on 17 different medications. That's right. Seventeen!

"I think he had three to four psychotropic medications in addition to the Depakote, in addition to Zoloft, in addition to Trazadone to help him sleep." Some of these drugs the FDA states are not even safe for kids. "He did need medications," she continues, "But I had concerns about how could this child require 17 different medications."

What's perhaps even more alarming, child advocates say, are the ages of the kids. The Trouble Shooters obtained a never before released study that tracks the ages of the foster kids on these drugs during a one month period of time. At least 300 of these children are under the age of 7.

Tanji Patton recently asked the President and CEO of the Children's Shelter in San Antonio, Jack Downey, "How big a problem do you think this is?"

Downey says, "I think it's far larger than you or I or anyone else suspects." This longtime advocate for children says his heart aches when he talks about the cases. He shared the story of one family he remembers in particular.

"We had a wonderful family of 5 boys," Downey recalls, "If they walked in right now you'd love them to death." The oldest was ten. The youngest was 3.

"We were directed by the state to take the boys to a psychiatrist," Downey says. "We did and they all came back on three meds...those boys no more needed meds than I did."

Patton asks, "Every child?" Downey replies, "Every child." So, why would a three year old need to be on psychotropic medications? "I have no idea. He was just the jolliest little kid," Downey tells us.

Who is prescribing these meds? You would think psychiatrists, right? Well, after pouring through thousands of documents, the News 4 WOAI Trouble Shooters found that's not always the case. Many are family practitioners.

State records show one of the biggest prescribers in San Antonio is a radiologist. Sure it's legal, but what does a radiologist know about a child's mental health?

YASSER ARAFAT died at age 75, lying in bed surrounded by familiar faces. He left this world peacefully, unlike the thousands of victims he sent to early graves.

In a better world, the PLO chief would have met his end on a gallows, hanged for mass murder much as the Nazi chiefs were hanged at Nuremberg. In a better world, the French president would not have paid a visit to the bedside of such a monster. In a better world, George Bush would not have said, on hearing the first reports that Arafat had died, "God bless his soul."

God bless his soul? What a grotesque idea! Bless the soul of the man who brought modern terrorism to the world? Who sent his agents to slaughter athletes at the Olympics, blow airliners out of the sky, bomb schools and pizzerias, machine-gun passengers in airline terminals? Who lied, cheated, and stole without compunction? Who inculcated the vilest culture of Jew-hatred since the Third Reich? Human beings might stoop to bless a creature so evil -- as indeed Arafat was blessed, with money, deference, even a Nobel Prize -- but God, I am quite sure, will damn him for eternity.

Arafat always inspired flights of nonsense from Western journalists, and his last two weeks were no exception.

Derek Brown wrote in The Guardian that Arafat's "undisputed courage as a guerrilla leader" was exceeded only "by his extraordinary courage" as a peace negotiator. But it is an odd kind of courage that expresses itself in shooting unarmed victims -- or in signing peace accords and then flagrantly violating their terms.

Another commentator, columnist Gwynne Dyer, asked, "So what did Arafat do right?" The answer: He drew worldwide attention to the Palestinian cause, "for the most part by successful acts of terror." In other words, butchering innocent human beings was "right," since it served an ulterior political motive. No doubt that thought brings daily comfort to all those who were forced to bury a child, parent, or spouse because of Arafat's "successful" terrorism.

Some journalists couldn't wait for Arafat's actual death to begin weeping for him. Take the BBC's Barbara Plett, who burst into tears on the day he was airlifted out of the West Bank. "When the helicopter carrying the frail old man rose above his ruined compound," Plett reported from Ramallah, "I started to cry." Normal people don't weep for brutal murderers, but Plett made it clear that her empathy for Arafat -- whom she praised as "a symbol of Palestinian unity, steadfastness, and resistance" -- was heartfelt:

"I remember well when the Israelis re-conquered the West Bank more than two years ago, how they drove their tanks and bulldozers into Mr. Arafat's headquarters, trapping him in a few rooms, and throwing a military curtain around Ramallah. I remember how Palestinians admired his refusal to flee under fire. They told me: `Our leader is sharing our pain, we are all under the same siege.' And so was I." Such is the state of journalism at the BBC, whose reporters do not seem to have any trouble reporting, dry-eyed, on the plight of Arafat's victims. (That is, when they mention them -- which Plett's teary bon voyage to Arafat did not.)

Power Line has much more in a post "Omitted from Arafat's AP obituary", with links to others who blogged Arafat's history.

UPDATE-1: NewsMax has a good flavor of his life in: "Arafat’s Trail of Terror" by Jon E. Dougherty.

ABIDJAN, Ivory Coast - France, the United States and other nations launched one of the largest evacuations of Africa’s post-independence era Wednesday, requisitioning commercial jets to fly out thousands of foreigners following attacks on civilians and peacekeeping troops.

Long convoys sent out by the U.S. Embassy and other nations rounded up foreigners from their homes for evacuation as Ivory Coast’s state TV alternately appealed for calm and for a mass uprising against the French, the country’s former colonial rulers.

By late afternoon, much of Ivory Coast’s largest city was quiet — the first break from violence since Saturday.

A taxpayer-funded group in New York City has taken out ads offering jobs to city residents, with one important proviso: No U.S. citizens need apply.

In a story first broken Tuesday by WABC Radio newsman George Weber, the New York Work Alliance began advertising for jobs that they said were available for "underprivileged job seekers" - as long as all applicants qualified as illegal aliens.

Last week, New York City Councilmen James Oddo and James Gallagher confirmed rumors that the taxpayer-funded non-profit group had been discriminating against American citizens.

Responding to its ad, Gallagher contacted the Alliance inquiring about the job offer, telling the group: "The only problem is - I'm a U.S. citizen. I was born here."

The response?

"I'm sorry, sir. You can't have a job."

Department of Veterans Affairs Veterans Day Home Page

Veterans Day, 2004
By the President of the United States of America
A Proclamation

In Focus: Veterans

Americans live in freedom because of our veterans' courage, dedication to duty, and love of country. On Veterans Day, we honor these brave men and women who have served in our Armed Forces and defended our Nation.

Across America, there are more than 25 million veterans. Their ranks include generations of citizens who have risked their lives while serving in military conflicts, including World War II, Korea, Vietnam, the Persian Gulf, and the war on terror. They have fought for the security of our country and the peace of the world. They have defended our founding ideals, protected the innocent, and liberated the oppressed from tyranny and terror. They have known the hardships and the fears and the tragic losses of war. Our veterans know that in the harshest hours of conflict they serve just and honorable purposes.

Through the years, our veterans have returned home from their duties to become active and responsible citizens in their communities, further contributing to the growth and development of our Nation. Their commitment to service inspires all Americans.

With respect for and in recognition of the contributions our service men and women have made to the cause of peace and freedom around the world, the Congress has provided (5 U.S.C. 6103(a)) that November 11 of each year shall be set aside as a legal public holiday to honor veterans.

NOW, THEREFORE, I, GEORGE W. BUSH, President of the United States of America, do hereby proclaim November 11, 2004, as Veterans Day and urge all Americans to observe November 7 through November 13, 2004, as National Veterans Awareness Week. I urge all Americans to recognize the valor and sacrifice of our veterans through ceremonies and prayers. I call upon Federal, State, and local officials to display the flag of the United States and to encourage and participate in patriotic activities in their communities. I invite civic and fraternal organizations, places of worship, schools, businesses, unions, and the media to support this national observance with commemorative expressions and programs.

IN WITNESS WHEREOF, I have hereunto set my hand this ninth day of November, in the year of our Lord two thousand four, and of the Independence of the United States of America the two hundred and twenty-ninth.

GEORGE W. BUSH

Lauer: "Let me talk about this idea that a rag-tag group, not well-fed, not well-clothed, completely under-equipped as compared to this great British army and the Hessian could accomplish this. And let me ask you to think about what is going on in Iraq today. Where the insurgents not well equipped, smaller in numbers, the greatest army in the world is their opposition. What's, what's the lesson?"

Cheney: "Well, the difference of course is who's fighting on the side of freedom. Ideas motivate people. And the idea of freedom is such a mighty one. There's a very good book by a man named David Hackett Fischer has written a book called Washington's Crossing. And I spent a good deal of time talking to him. He talks about how this is an entirely new thing. These are people who are fighting not because they had to, they could walk off. At one point Washington had to convince many of them to stay."

Lauer: "I think he promised them more pay, actually."

Cheney: "He did. But he also told them they were fighting for a mighty idea. And I think the same has been true. The same advantage has been at the back of Americans forever. We have a mighty cause in which we're fighting."

Lauer: "I'm just saying, but the insurgents believe they're fighting for a cause as well. They don't believe any less than we believe. And yet -- "

Cheney: "Well, but Matt, you're being awfully relativistic here. I mean, the insurgents are killing Iraqis by the hundreds, Iraqis by the thousands. It's not as though this is a matter between just 'on the one hand on the other hand.' We are on the side of freedom. We are on the side that I think that idea is so powerful and does give us wind at our back."

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. trade deficit narrowed more than expected in September as a rise in exports to unprecedented levels offset the impact of record-high prices for imported oil, a government report showed on Wednesday.

The monthly trade gap totaled $51.6 billion, down from a revised $53.5 billion in August, the Commerce Department said. Economists had forecast the September trade deficit would come in at $53.5 billion, only slightly lower than the original estimate for August of $54.0 billion.

"It is pretty encouraging news and says that we will probably get an upward revision to third-quarter GDP (gross domestic product)," said David Resler, chief economist with Nomura Securities International in New York.

The top U.S. commander in Iraq, Gen. George Casey, told President Bush on Wednesday that his troops are "making very good progress" securing Iraq, as U.S. forces and their Iraqi allies essentially paralyzed insurgent forces in Fallujah and cut off their escape routes from the city.

"He said that things are going well in Fallujah," Bush said on a day when U.S. forces cornered insurgents after a swift advance that seized control of 70 percent of the militant stronghold.

Bush said his Iraq commanders had not asked for more troops. "If the commanders were to bring forth a request, I would look at it very seriously and implement the request. They have yet to do so," the president told reporters in the Oval Office. Bush said Casey had told him that "they're making very good progress in securing that country."

The senior U.S. Marine commander there said Wednesday echoed that message.

"We are comfortable that they are not able to communicate, to work out any coordination," Lt. Gen. John Sattler said of Fallujah's insurgents. He spoke at a news conference at Camp Fallujah, outside the city. "They are now in small pockets, blind, moving about the city. We will continue to hunt them down and destroy them."

U.S. officials have been predicting for weeks that violence in Iraq would escalate as national elections scheduled for January drew closer. They believe the rebels' main goal is to prevent the elections.

Back home, we plunked ourselves down in front of the TV and settled in for a long night of inanity from the talking heads on CNN. The New York City polls were a paradox, Wolf Blitzer burbled: On the one hand, New Yorkers were overwhelmingly against the war in Iraq; on the other, they were deeply concerned about terrorism. Wolf! Wolf! Don’t you understand that the two are inextricably linked? We’re “concerned” about terrorism because we’re concerned about the war in Iraq. The deeper we get into this war, the more despised we are by the Islamic world. War in Iraq = likelihood of attack. Why is this simple equation so hard for the American people to get?

By eleven or so, I was getting nervous. It was disturbing to see that little cluster of blue states huddled in the upper right-hand corner of the map: Maine, Vermont, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, New York. . . . Why was that configuration so familiar? Of course! The thirteen colonies! What if we’d lost the Revolutionary War? We would have ended up a tidy, boring commonwealth like Canada, or a civilized transatlantic outpost of Europe. New York could have been its cosmopolitan capital. Instead it’s perceived as a mega–Key West dominated by gays and old-fashioned liberals and progressive rich people and media pundits and academics and Jews and intellectuals and academic Jewish intellectuals—marginal, eccentric, foreign. It’s the obverse of Sally Fields’s famous Oscar cry: You really hate me!

“We’re too self-involved to listen to the rest of the country and hear through the din and clutter of the white noise that drowns out everything but our own thoughts, how afraid they are that the world is changing too fast for them and that there’s no place to hide,” says the CUNY historian and biographer David Nasaw. Put simply, they don’t care about the same things we care about. Very few of the people lined up at the fish counter of Zabar’s are fretting about their right to bear arms. We live in a post-Copernican universe. Manhattan thought it was the Earth and that all the planets—the red states—revolved around it. Only it turns out that the red states are the sun. The center will not hold because it’s not the center. Remember that much-reproduced Saul Steinberg cover that showed the United States from the typical New Yorker’s perspective? New York City stretched almost to the Pacific; the rest of the country was a sliver. Now we’re the ones who’ve vanished on the horizon.

I set the alarm for 1 A.M. and crashed. When I resumed my bleary vigil, concern turned to panic. It was all up to Ohio now, and Ohio was 52 percent Bush, 48 percent Kerry. Click. “I felt like Charlie Brown after Lucy yanks the football away for the umpteenth time,” a friend said later.

Up again at six, I heard the Times’ heavy thump in the hall: BUSH HOLDS LEAD. In the kitchen, I turned on WQXR; the mellifluous, cultivated voice of Annie Bergen introduced some tootling Haydn wind ensemble. Do you mean there’s still going to be civilization? Classical music, summaries of the week’s New York Times Book Review, murmurous programs on the “Treasures of Ancient China” exhibit at the Met? New Yorkers are so sensitive. Think how worried we are about our image abroad: When I was last in Paris, the concierge at the Pont Royal was so rude to me. I don’t think people realize how many enemies we’ve made. . . . The Republican line on foreign policy is less agonized: Who gives a fuck?

On the Fifth Avenue bus, I gazed blankly out the window. The trees in Central Park were still in their vivid autumn plumage, red, yellow, and green set on fire by the early sun. I found myself thinking that what my friend Edgar, the radical novelist, calls “incremental fascism” doesn’t seem so incremental anymore. There will be a draft, and we’ll have to leave the country: No way I’m letting our 17-year-old son, Will, be sent to Iraq. They’ll drill the Alaskan tundra for oil, and the polar ice caps will melt; Manhattan will be inundated like in The Day After Tomorrow. They’ll teach creationism in the schools; our grandchildren will scratch their armpits like orangutans and laugh, “Can you believe people used to think we were descended from apes?” Anyone who belonged to Students for a Democratic Society 35 years ago will be fingerprinted. The Patriot Act will be broadened to stifle dissent in the media—Paul Krugman will be sent to Gitmo. The deficit will mount, and they’ll loot Social Security; I’ll end up in an SRO on upper Broadway. And the Jews will be rounded up like in Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America. Did only Paul Wolfowitz stand between us and concentration camps in Kentucky? New York will be attacked again and . . . Wait. Maybe the guys in power want us to be attacked. What better way to get rid of all those noisome New Yorkers than to have an Al Qaeda dirty bomb explode in Grand Central at rush hour? No more need to bail out New York, because there won’t be any New York.

In my office, I surveyed the detritus of the ground war on my desk: contact numbers, campaign brochures, directions to Philadelphia. I flicked on my computer. A message from MoveOn, dated November 2, 5:20 A.M.: “This is it. If you haven’t voted yet, now is the time.” I stared at the screen. Why was the sensation that gripped my heart so familiar? All at once it came to me: It was the same sensation I get when I notice the black-framed photograph of my late father on the wall. He’s gone, and he’s not coming back.

Who can care about this pathos? Not I [Hitchens]. But I do take strong exception to one strain in the general moaning. It seems that anyone fool enough to favor the re-election of the president is by definition a God-bothering, pulpit-pounding Armageddon-artist, enslaved by ancient texts and prophecies and committed to theocratic rule. I was instructed in last week's New York Times that this was the case, and that the Enlightenment had come to an end, by no less an expert than Garry Wills, who makes at least one of his many livings by being an Augustinian Roman Catholic.

[snip]

But all faiths are not always equally demented in the same way, or at the same time. Islam, which was once a civilizing and creative force in many societies, is now undergoing a civil war. One faction in this civil war is explicitly totalitarian and wedded to a cult of death. We have seen it at work on the streets of our own cities, and most recently on the streets of Amsterdam. We know that the obscene butchery of filmmaker Theo van Gogh was only a warning of what is coming in Madrid, London, Rome, and Paris, let alone Baghdad and Basra.

So here is what I want to say on the absolutely crucial matter of secularism. Only one faction in American politics has found itself able to make excuses for the kind of religious fanaticism that immediately menaces us in the here and now. And that faction, I am sorry and furious to say, is the left. From the first day of the immolation of the World Trade Center, right down to the present moment, a gallery of pseudointellectuals has been willing to represent the worst face of Islam as the voice of the oppressed. How can these people bear to reread their own propaganda? Suicide murderers in Palestine—disowned and denounced by the new leader of the PLO—described as the victims of "despair." The forces of al-Qaida and the Taliban represented as misguided spokespeople for antiglobalization. The blood-maddened thugs in Iraq, who would rather bring down the roof on a suffering people than allow them to vote, pictured prettily as "insurgents" or even, by Michael Moore, as the moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers. If this is liberal secularism, I'll take a modest, God-fearing, deer-hunting Baptist from Kentucky every time, as long as he didn't want to impose his principles on me (which our Constitution forbids him to do).

One probably should not rest too much on the similarity between Bin Laden's last video and the newly available DVD of Fahrenheit 9/11. I would only say that, if Bin Laden had issued a tape that with equal fealty followed the playbook of Karl Rove (and do please by all means cross yourself at the mention of this unholy name), it might have garnered some more attention. The Bearded One moved pedantically through Moore's bill of indictment, checking off the Florida vote-count in 2000, the "Pet Goat" episode on the day of hell, the violent intrusion into hitherto peaceful and Muslim Iraq, and the division between Bush and the much nicer Europeans. (For some reason, unknown to me at any rate, he did not attack the President for allowing the Bin Laden family to fly out of American airspace.)

George Bush may subjectively be a Christian, but he—and the U.S. armed forces—have objectively done more for secularism than the whole of the American agnostic community combined and doubled. The demolition of the Taliban, the huge damage inflicted on the al-Qaida network, and the confrontation with theocratic saboteurs in Iraq represent huge advances for the non-fundamentalist forces in many countries. The "antiwar" faction even recognizes this achievement, if only indirectly, by complaining about the way in which it has infuriated the Islamic religious extremists around the world. But does it accept the apparent corollary—that we should have been pursuing a policy to which the fanatics had no objection?

[snip]

DENVER (AP) -- The FBI is investigating the reported thefts of scores of propane cylinders in the Denver area, raising fears that the highly flammable gas could be used in a crime or terrorist attack.

About 100 cylinders, each containing about 7.8 gallons of liquid propane and weighing about 33 pounds, have been stolen from various businesses since July, FBI special agent Monique Kelso said Monday.

The investigation was first reported by KMGH-TV in Denver.

"The potential threat is that these propane tanks get into the wrong hands ... and get into the hands of those that are willing to commit a crime on the magnitude of the Oklahoma City bombing or another terrorist attack," Kelso told the station.

Kelso said Monday the tanks might also have been taken to power equipment such as farm machinery. The tanks are larger than those used for barbecue grills.

The spot-market price of propane shot up 66 percent in the past year, hovering around 90 cents a gallon last week.

American Coastopia

The idea isn't just a joke; one top Democrat says, "The segment of the country that pays for the federal government is now being governed by the people who don't pay for the federal government."

"Some would say, 'Oh, poor Alabama. It's cut off from the wealth infusion that it gets from New York and California,' " said Lawrence O'Donnell, a veteran Democratic insider and now senior political analyst at MSNBC. "But the more this political condition goes on at the presidential level of the red and blue states, the more you're testing the inclination of the blue states to say, 'So what?' "

Mr. O'Donnell raised the subject of secession on "The McLaughlin Group" during the weekend. "Ninety percent of the red states are welfare-client states of the federal government," said Mr. O'Donnell, who was an aide to Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, New York Democrat.

In a telephone interview, Mr. O'Donnell said the red states that went to Mr. Bush "collect more from the federal government than they send in. New York and California, Connecticut — the states that are blue are all the states that are paying for the bulk of everything this government does, from ... Social Security to everything else, and the people in those states don't like what this government is doing."

The Internet has exploded with talk of a blue-state confederacy, including one screed circulating by e-mail that features a map of a new country called "American Coastopia" and proposes lopping off the Northeast, the West Coast and the upper Midwest to form a new country, away from the "rednecks in Oklahoma" and the "homophobic knuckle-draggers in Wyoming."

"We were all going to move to various other countries, but then we thought — why should WE move?" the anonymous message asks. "We hold our noses as we fly over you. We are sickened by the way you treat people that are different from you. The rest of the world despises America, and we don't want to be lumped in with you anymore."

The secession movement has already spawned commercial opportunism. One Web site is selling T-shirts that read "I seceded."

More than a dozen traumatized John Kerry supporters have sought and received therapy from a licensed Florida psychologist since their candidate lost to President Bush, the Boca Raton News learned Monday.

Boca Raton trauma specialist Douglas Schooler said he has treated 15 clients and friends with “intense hypnotherapy” since the Democratic nominee conceded last Wednesday.

“I had one friend tell me he’s never been so depressed and angry in his life,” Schooler said. “I observed patients threatening to leave the country or staring listlessly into space. They were emotionally paralyzed, shocked and devastated.”

Schooler’s disclosure comes after the weekend discovery of a Kerry volunteer’s corpse at Ground Zero in New York City. Georgia resident Andrew Veal, 25, reportedly killed himself with a shotgun blast to the head due to Kerry’s loss and a girlfriend problem.

Some mental health professionals in South Florida said Monday they have already developed a new category for the Kerry-related stress reactions. Because Palm Beach County voted heavily for Kerry, the therapists said, many residents hurt themselves by so anxiously expecting the Massachusetts senator to win – especially those who maintained unrealistic recount hopes after their candidate’s concession.

“We’re calling it ‘post-election selection trauma’ and we’re working to develop a counseling program for it,” said Rob Gordon, the Boca-based executive director of the American Health Association. “It’s like post-traumatic stress syndrome, but it’s a short-term shock rather than a childhood trauma.”

Gordon, the first American Red Cross psychotherapist sent to Ground Zero after the 9/11 terror attacks, said therapists’ main concern is to prevent the recurrence of Kerry-related suicides like the one in New York City.

“There are definitely people depressed by John Kerry’s loss, and this can easily lead to suicides like the one we saw up in New York this weekend,” Gordon said. “Luckily, it can be treated if people seek help. We’re urging people to call us immediately if they feel depressed or know anyone who is seriously stressed out.”

Tammy Imre, 29, of Stratford is accused of first-degree sexual assault, fourth-degree sexual assault and risk of injury to a minor.

[snip]

When confronted, police said Imre acknowledged to having sexual relations with the boy. Imre told investigators she considers the 8-year-old youngster her boyfriend and that she plans to marry him someday, police said.

If convicted, Imre could serve more than 20 years in prison.

1) The old Taft Republicans. These are the old Northeastern WASP Republicans. George H.W. Bush was the embodiment of this group, as is Arlen Specter - the pro-business GOP. This group greatly misunderstands and even resents Group 4 Moral Values Republicans and are most vulnerable to being picked off by another ideological movement.

2) The limited government Republicans. Both Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich represented this group. These are also the term-limits Republicans who honored their pledges to serve only six years in the Legislature. These guys HATE, HATE, HATE the deficits and the debt. They love tax-cuts and slashing government programs. If you are against deficits, these guys will jump in bed with you at the drop of a hat.

3) National Security Republicans. This group is the result of a backlash against the anti-war movements of the 60's and early 70's, and also newly minted anti-terrorists hawks. Many of these people are the "Reagan Democrats" and "9/11 Democrats." Think Zell Miller, Ed Koch, Sam Nunn, Rudi Giuliani etc. Also, think of libertarian bloggers like Glenn Reynolds, and Roger L. Simon, and Dean Esmay.

4) The Moral Values Republicans. These are the quintessential Republican "little people." They/We are animated by fighting judicial tyranny. We resent our values being trampled upon by both the unelected whims of federal judges, and by the propaganda of Hollywood and the Press. This group is naturally isolationist and not particularly interested in the day-to-day practical aspect of governing. We are determined to have the Supreme Court retrofitted to immunize the Society from cases like the Massachusetts Supreme Court's attempt to impose gay marriage on the nation.

Contrary to most liberals' fears, we would be content to let issues like gay marriage, abortion, etc be resolved in the legislature. What this group has in common with liberals is a high value for individual freedom. What liberals don't understand is that freedom for us includes the freedom from having liberal sensibilities imposed on us from outside. Having had our values trampled onby the judiciary since 1962, we are not animated by the prospect of reversing that imposition, i.e. the fear of liberals of the religious right imposing our values on them is unfounded.

What is important is permanently changing the structure of government to prohibit judges from making up the law without popular consent. Education reform is also very high on the agenda of Moral Values Republicans. Tax policy, the size of government, and pro-business policies are secondary to this group, and liberal economic policies are easily tolerated and even sometimes championed by members of this group.

This group is also your natural "FREE SPEECH" ally, if you consider political correctness of universities and campaign finance reform to be wrong. But remember, "FREE SPEECH" to these people also means the right to erect nativity scenes on public property.

MEXICO CITY (AP) - Mexico is holding out hope that Latin America will get more attention during President Bush's second term and obtain changes in what a senior Cabinet minister calls ``absurd'' U.S. immigration policies.

Secretary of State Colin Powell, Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge and several other U.S. Cabinet members are expected to begin a two-day visit to Mexico City starting Monday. During the talks, Mexico will push for a long-awaited accord on migrants' rights - and seek to put the region back on the White House agenda.

``It's absurd that (the United States) is spending as much as it's spending to stop immigration flows that can't be stopped ... instead of using that money on real threats that pose risks for both countries,'' Interior Secretary Santiago Creel said earlier this week.

Creel said he sensed ``an openness to talking about immigration issues'' but warned against ``raising expectations beyond what is politically viable and really possible,'' a reference to resistance among U.S. legislators, despite a pair of temporary worker bills already before Congress.

Mexico acknowledged it suffered a setback in the Nov. 2 elections, when Arizona voters approved Proposition 200, a ballot initiative aimed at keeping illegal immigrants from voting and obtaining some government services.

The Arizona initiative would ``foment racial discrimination and limit (migrants') access to basic services like health and education,'' Mexico's Foreign Relations Department said in a news statement.

A complex supercomputer being constructed for the US government has demonstrated double the power of the long-reigning supercomputing champion, despite being only partially built.

IBM's BlueGene/L achieved a record-breaking performance of 70.72 teraflops, announced Spencer Abraham, US energy secretary, on Thursday.

A single teraflop is one million million floating-point operations - or intensive mathematical calculations - per second, and is about 100 times faster than the most powerful desktop computers.

The new speed by BlueGene/L is precisely twice as fast as the computer officially ranked the world's fastest - NEC's Earth Simulator, based at Yokohama, Japan.

BlueGene/L has been developed in cooperation with the US department of energy's National Nuclear Security Administration and is being constructed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, California.

The official list of the 500 most powerful supercomputers in the world will be revealed at the Supercomputing Conference 2004 (SC2004), in Pittsburgh on Monday.

The Earth Simulator currently occupies the number one spot with a peak performance of 35.86 teraflops. But now BlueGene/L seems destined to storm straight to the top of the chart.

Perhaps the most surprising news for gay observers of the presidential election is that exit polls show President Bush received the exact same percentage of gay votes — 23 percent — as he did four years ago. This despite the president's vocal support for a federal constitutional amendment banning gay marraige.

According to the CNN exit poll, 4 percent of all voters identified as gay, lesbian or bisexual, the same percentage as four years ago, at least as reported by ABC News that year. By comparison, 11 percent of voters were black, 9 percent were Latino, 2 percent were Asian, and 3 percent were Jewish. In 1996, 5 percent of the electorate self-identified as gay.

Democrat John Kerry did pick up a slightly higher tally of gay voters, however. Kerry received 77 percent of gay votes according to the NEP poll; Gore received 70 percent in 2000 according to ABC.

Chris Crain at The Washington Blade points out that preliminary exit polls show that nearly 25 percent of the gay vote held for President Bush last night, his same result from four years ago. (Hat tip: Instapundit)

In fact, Christian Grantham has the numbers:

GAY VOTE: 4,524,641 gays and lesbians voted (4% of total population). 1,040,667 (23%) cast a vote for George Bush.

Chris Crain notes that this comes as perhaps the "most surprising news for gay observers." Well, this doesn't come as any surprise to those of us who reject the radical gay leftist agenda which was obsessed with the destruction of the President at the expense of our long term gay rights progress.

One of Christian's commenters sums it up well:

Here we go with the liberal whining. The 23% of gays that voted for Bush is the same percentage of gays that have a job and a life. They don't want to see terrorist and wacko liberals bleeding their security and hard earned success. Please forgive them.

I certainly hope it comes as a big surprise and wake up call to the national Log Cabin Republicans Board of Directors that has alienated its constituents across the United States; those of us who stayed with the President in a time of war.

So LCR, HRC, NGLTF are now not only stuck with the a Republican-dominated Federal government they have shown no interest in engaging with; the American public itself has soundly rejected the gay marriage issue nationwide.

The only reasoning I can glean from all of this is that many gays, lesbians and bisexuals like most americans are not one issue voters. They like the rest of us put the war on terrorism, security and the economy ahead of other issues.

Click for Johnny Cash Memorial
Feb 26, 1932 - Sep 12, 2003

November 1, 2004 -- WASHINGTON - Osama bin Laden warned in his October Surprise video that he will be closely monitoring the state-by-state election returns in tomorrow's presidential race — and will spare any state that votes against President Bush from being attacked, according to a new analysis of his statement.

The respected Middle East Media Research Institute, which monitors and translates Arabic media and Internet sites, said initial translations of a key portion of bin Laden's video rant to the American people Friday night missed an ostentatious bid by the Saudi-born terror master to divide American voters and tilt the election towards Democratic challenger John Kerry.

MEMRI said radical Islamist commentators monitored over the Internet this past weekend also interpreted the key passage of bin Laden's diatribe to mean that any U.S. state that votes to elect Bush on Tuesday will be considered an "enemy" and any state that votes for Kerry has "chosen to make peace with us."

The statement in question is when bin Laden said on the tape: "Your security is up to you, and any state that does not toy with our security automatically guarantees its own security."

That sentence followed a lengthy passage in the video in which bin Laden launches personal attacks on the president.

Yigal Carmon, president of MEMRI, said bin Laden used the Arabic term "ay-wilaya" to refer to a "state" in that sentence.

That term "specifically refers to an American state, like Tennessee," Carmon said, adding that if bin Laden were referring to a "country" he would have used the Arabic word "dawla."

The "honorable discharge" on the Kerry Web site appears to be a Carter administration substitute for an original action expunged from Mr. Kerry's record, according to Mark Sullivan, who retired as a captain in the Navy's Judge Advocate General Corps Reserve in 2003 after 33 years of service as a judge advocate. Mr. Sullivan served in the office of the Secretary of the Navy between 1975 and 1977.

On behalf of the Kerry campaign, Michael Meehan and others have repeatedly insisted that all of Mr. Kerry's military records are on his Web site atjohnkerry.com, except for his medical records.

"If that is the case," Mr. Sullivan said, "the true story isn't what was on the Web site. It's what's missing. There should have been an honorable discharge certificate issued to Kerry in 1975,if not earlier, three years after his transfer to the Standby Reserve-Inactive."

Another retired Navy Reserve officer, who served three tours in the Navy's Bureau of Personnel, points out that there should also have been a certified letter giving Mr. Kerry a choice of a reserve reaffiliation or separation and discharge. If Mr. Meehan is correct and all the documents are indeed on the Web site, the absence of any documents from 1972 to 1978 in the posted Kerry files is a glaring hole in the record.

The applicable U.S. Navy regulation, now found at MILPERSMAN 1920-210 "Types of Discharge for Officers," lists five examples of conditions required to receive an honorable discharge certificate, four required to receive a general discharge "not of such a nature as to require discharge under conditions other than honorable," and seven for "the lowest type of separation from the naval service. It is now officially in all respects equivalent to a dishonorable discharge."

Kerry spokesmen have also repeatedly said that the senator has an honorable discharge. And there is indeed a cover letter to an honorable discharge dated February 16,1978,on the Kerry Web site. It is in form and reference to regulation exactly the same as one granted Swiftboat Veterans for Truth member Robert Shirley on March 12, 1971, during a periodic "reduction in force (RIF)" by the Naval Reserve. The only significant difference between Mr. Kerry's and Mr. Shirley's is the signature information and the dates. In a RIF, officers who no longer have skills or are of an age group the Navy wishes to keep in reserve are involuntarily separated by the Navy and given their appropriate discharge. This is a normal and ongoing activity and there is no stigma attached to it.

Kerry spokesman David Wade did not reply when asked if Mr. Kerry was other than honorably discharged before he was honorably discharged.

"Mr. Meehan may well be right and all Mr. Kerry's military records are on his Web site," Mr. Sullivan said. "Unlike en listed members, officers do not receive other than honorable, or dishonorable, certificates of discharge. To the contrary, the rule is that no certificate will be awarded to an officer separated wherever the circumstances prompting separation are not deemed consonant with traditional naval concepts of honor. The absence of an honorable discharge certificate for a separated naval officer is, therefore, a harsh and severe sanction and is, in fact, the treatment given officers who are dismissed after a general court-martial."

With the only discharge document cited by Mr. Kerry issued in 1978, three years after the last date it should have been issued, the absence of a certificate from 1975 leaves only two possibilities. Either Mr. Kerry received an "other than honorable" certificate that has been removed in a review purging it from his records, or even worse, he received no certificate at all. In both cases there would have been a loss of all of Mr. Kerry's medals and the suspension of all benefits of service.

About 60 mainly European election observers have taken up their posts in six states, including Florida and Ohio, saying they hope their presence will serve as a "preventative to the shenanigans" during voting tomorrow.

"We will tell the people of Ohio whether their election is free and fair," said one of the observers, Hugo Coveliers, a Belgian senator who plans to monitor voting in Cleveland.