Harry’s place has this to say:

Harry’s Place may be removed (or rather have it’s DNS disabled) after a ‘complaint’ to the company that our domain name is registered with.

We assume after threats were made on the weekend that this ‘complaint’ originates from Jenna Delich or her supporters. Though we have not yet seen the complaint submitted, we assume it runs along the lines that pointing out that Ms Delich linked to the website of a known neo-Nazi figure and former Ku Klux Klan leader is defamatory.

This is extraordinary since Ms Delich has not denied that she circulated links to David Dukes website. There would be no point since the evidence is in the public domain. Nevertheless, a malicious complaint has been made to the company hosting our DNS. We would like to assure readers of Harry’s Place that we are doing everything we can to prevent a disruption, but that - of course - we will not concede any ground. We have posted nothing defamatory, and we stand by the information we have supplied. ISPs often run scared of UK libel law and malicious complaints are thus common. Sadly, it is a well known - and usually successful - way of censoring websites which publish truths that they’d rather not be generally known. We ask our readers and supporters in the meantime to publish this information as widely as possible. The disgraceful tactic of dishonest and malicious complaining should not be allowed to succeed. Those on the UCU list, please also make this know there. Please spread the word. If we go down, email us at harryblog at gee mail dot com for updates. UPDATE: For those who can still see us - we’ve put up an archive of the Delich-related material here, which we will use to post updates on this saga: http://jennadelich.blogspot.com/

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“A government big enough to give you everything you want, is big enough to take away everything you have.”

~Barry Goldwater

Watching the Democratic National Convention this year has been an odd experience for me.  I have enjoyed some of the speeches.  Governor Schweitzer of Montana was fun, and his speech was a good preface to Hillary’s call for unity.  Even I can be roused by some of the calls for a better tomorrow, by the pleas for new technologies, greater investment in science and our education.

I just find that on a logical level–on the plain of Reason rather than Emotion–I could not adopt much of the liberal ideology, even if I wanted to.  For instance, last night at the DNC convention, I’m not sure how many times supposedly intelligent people said something to the effect of “Gas prices have gone up, and oil companies are making record profits, so we need to tax gas companies more (to punish them!)”

This use of windfall profit taxes requires a complete abandonment of reason.

First of all, yes gas prices are up.  This is due to a number of things, but primarily to supply and demand.  Also, yes, the oil companies are making record profits.  This, however, is not due to gas prices being up, but to sales being up.  It is costing the gas companies more to get the oil, and this added cost is passed along to the consumer.  Add to this the fact that as China and India develop their economies, they purchase more oil.  So do other developing nations. So, for oil companies, sales are up.  This means they make more money.  So do the nations which sell the oil in the first place, like Saudi Arabia, Venezuela and the UAE.
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The Hill reports on Billy-boy’s latest gaffe:

DENVER — Bill Clinton appeared to undermine Sen. Barack Obama again Tuesday.

The former president, speaking in Denver, posed a hypothetical question in which he seemed to suggest that that the Democratic Party was making a mistake in choosing Obama as its presidential nominee.

He said: “Suppose you’re a voter, and you’ve got candidate X and candidate Y. Candidate X agrees with you on everything, but you don’t think that candidate can deliver on anything at all. Candidate Y you agree with on about half the issues, but he can deliver. Which candidate are you going to vote for?”

Then, perhaps mindful of how his off-the-cuff remarks might be taken, Clinton added after a pause: “This has nothing to do with what’s going on now.”

For more on this outrage, go here, here, or here.

Michelle Malkin was attacked by protesters and conspiracy nut Alex Jones during the “Shake Your Money Maker” event while Recreate68 attempted to levitate the Denver Mint. Another protester began shouting “Kill Michelle Malkin.”

As I argued this afternoon, Michael Dukakis held a seven-point lead over George H.W. Bush in public opinion polling on the eve of the 1988 Democratic National Convention. Governor Dukakis went on to enjoy a 17 percentage-point bounce after being nominated by his party for the general election campaign.

But this year, Barack Obama’s campaign is floundering in the polls in an election that has all the makings and excitement of a Democratic blowout in November. Indeed, at an identical point in the campaign compared to 20 years ago (with the Democrats then, like now, seeking the White House after nearly eight years of GOP rule), Gallup finds the 2008 race in a perfect tie, with 45 percent of voters nationwide supporting each candidate for president.

This should not be happening to the Democrats.

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By Andrew L. Jaffee, netwmd.com

U.S. financial assistance to Israel can be a contentious topic, even when discussing foreign policy issues using accurate information. Very often, opponents of Israel use wildly exaggerated, even fabricated “facts and figures” and extremely hyperbolic language to disparage the Jewish State — even claiming the U.S. has been pushed to the verge of bankruptcy by supporting Israel. The obfuscations about U.S. aid to Israel have been bothering me for a very long time, so I decided to research the numbers myself and compare my findings to the figures advanced by hysterical critics of Israel.

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I am bored with the election campaign at the moment; with little of substance coming out of either camp, I have opted to ignoring it until either candidate picks their VP, or when they enter their conventions. I recommend both candidates take this time to go on vacation, and hopefully we can have a more interesting debate when they return, rested and less cranky. It will also be interesting to see what the talking heads on cable news networks will talk about when they don’t have every campaign zig and zag to dissect.

I did notice that while the Socialist Party of the United States (SP-USA) has Brian Moore as their Presidential candidate, they also have a page at Obama’s website, which leads me to believe they would prefer him in office to McCain (I don’t think this is a leap in judgment, nor do I intended it to be a smear against Obama, but disagree with me if you must).

I find socialist parties within the United States and like minded groups on the left to be endlessly fascinating, so this seemed like a good time to go into an important split to the party’s ranks that produced some of those ex-Trotskyite Neocons everyone loves to hate.
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Read Buchanan’s pro-Russian article here.

The neocons got their war with Iraq. They are pushing for war on Iran. And they are now baiting the Russian Bear.

Is this what McCain has on offer? Endless war?

Buchanan, it seems, forgets who the aggressor is, and prefers to see everything from within his cozy, isolationist bubble.

Read Christopher Hitchen’s scathing review of Buchanan’s WWII revisionst book here.

Pat Buchanan, twice a candidate for the Republican nomination and in 2000 the standard-bearer for the Reform Party who ignited a memorable “chad” row in Florida, has now condensed all the antiwar arguments into one. His case, made in his recently released “Churchill, Hitler and the Unnecessary War,” is as follows:

• That Germany was faced with encirclement and injustice in both 1914 and 1939.
• Britain in both years ought to have stayed out of quarrels on the European mainland.
• That Winston Churchill was the principal British warmonger on both occasions.
• The United States was needlessly dragged into war on both occasions.
• That the principal beneficiaries of this were Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong.
• That the Holocaust of European Jewry was as much the consequence of an avoidable war as it was of Nazi racism.

Isolationism is one thing, but excusing the actions of Hitler and the Final Solution–pinning them on the Allies as a German reaction to Allied hostility?

A rare moment of peace in an increasingly bitter campaign.

I have to admit, I’m growing weary of this Presidential campaign.  I’m tired of hearing Obama’s middle name uttered like a condemnation; I’m tired of hearing McCain’s name altered to describe various mental states.  I don’t want to hear about the former POW’s lack of courage, or his party days.  Nor do I want to know about Obama’s association with various fringe political figures, pseudo-terrorists, or hear implications of his supposed lack of patriotism.

I just don’t want to walk into 2009 befuddled by smears of our incoming President, haunted by rumors and allegations, forced to run to one side of a bitter fence or another.  I don’t want to be part of one slice of a divided America.

Now, don’t get me wrong–America is and always will be divided based on huge, irreconcilable political differences.  The issues at stake range from the amount of government we want intervening on our behalf to reproductive rights to the nature of our foreign policy.

An Independent’s Perspective

I find myself in the uncomfortable position of not agreeing with either candidate very much.  On social issues I tend to be very liberal, very worried of the encroachment of the State on our personal liberties–especially when the State becomes too heavily influenced by the religious right.  On the other hand, I find the foreign policy stance of the Left utterly confusing.  To leave Iraq now, I believe, would be a disaster, and a human tragedy.

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This could change the way the world works:

SAN FRANCISCO (AFP) - Intel on Thursday showed off a wireless electric power system that analysts say could revolutionize modern life by freeing devices from transformers and wall outlets.

Intel chief technology officer Justin Rattner demonstrated a Wireless Energy Resonant Link as he spoke at the California firm’s annual developers forum in San Francisco.

Electricity was sent wirelessly to a lamp on stage, lighting a 60 watt bulb that uses more power than a typical laptop computer.

Most importantly, the electricity was transmitted without zapping anything or anyone that got between the sending and receiving units.

“The trick with wireless power is not can you do it; it’s can you do it safely and efficiently,” Intel researcher Josh Smith said in an online video explaining the breakthrough.

“It turns out the human body is not affected by magnetic fields; it is affected by elective fields. So what we are doing is transmitting energy using the magnetic field not the electric field.”

Examples of potential applications include airports, offices or other buildings that could be rigged to supply power to laptops, mobile telephones or other devices toted into them.

The technology could also be built into plugged in computer components, such as monitors, to enable them to broadcast power to devices left on desks or carried into rooms, according to Smith.

“Initially it eliminates chargers and eventually it eliminates batteries all together,” analyst Rob Enderle of Enderle Group said of Intel’s wireless power system.

“That is potentially a world changing event. This is the closest we’ve had to something being commercially available in this class.”

Previous wireless power systems consisted basically of firing lightning bolts from sending to receiving units.

Smith says Intel’s wireless power system is still in an early stage of development and much research remains before it can be brought to market.

Rattner spoke of technological transformations he expects by the year 2050.

“You’d like to cut the last cord,” Smith said.

“It’s great that we have wireless email and wireless internet and stuff like that but at the end of the day it would be nice to have wireless recharge as well.”

I’m sure many engaged in today’s huge controversy over John McCain’s houses believe they’ve found a winning ticket in portraying the Arizona Senator as “elitist” and “out of touch” with average Americans facing economic dislocation.

Barack Obama led the charge himself at a campaign rally today in Chester, Virginia, where he claimed:

I guess if you think that being rich means you gotta make five million dollars, and if you don’t know how many houses you have, then it’s not surprising that you might think the economy is fundamentally strong.

There’s no other way to look at Obama’s outburst (and the left’s piling on) than anything besides rank class warfare.

Maybe this tack will play well in stoking latent working class resentments at inflation, housing instability, and rising unemployment. Maybe this meme will stick if the American electorate is undergoing a fundamental shift in ideological orienation toward the abandonment of free market competition and opportunity-based upward mobility. Or, perhaps Obama’s income-envy will play with those who harbor genuine revolutionary inclinations, and see the Illinois Senator as the vanguard of the proletariat.

More likely, Obama’s attack on McCain’s residential non-recollection reveals the candidate’s subterranean push to resurrect Great Society liberalism in America.

Note that Obama’s quoted in the Wall Street Journal today, regarding his recent statements on health care reform:

‘If I were designing a system from scratch, I would probably go ahead with a single-payer system,” Barack Obama told an audience in Albuquerque on Monday. He was lauding the idea of a health-care market — or nonmarket — entirely run by the government.

Most liberals support single payer, aka “Medicare for All,” because it would eliminate the profit motive, which by their lights is the reason Americans are uninsured….

With good reason, critics often call this a back-door route to a centrally planned health-care bureaucracy. For all his lawyerly qualifications, Mr. Obama has essentially admitted that his proposal is really the front door.

Thus, Obama’s smears this afternoon are of a piece with his larger shift toward leftist ideological transparency.

Indeed, it’s all coming together: Obama has been under fire this week for advocating an abortion position tantamount to infanticide, which has placed him to the left of NARAL. Obama’s also been revealed as nothing more than a two-bit machine politician (rather that some ethereal agent of post-partisan transformation) by reports that he won his first election to the Illinois legislature in 1996 by disqualifying all of his electoral opponents from the ballot. It turns out, moreover, that the Obama camp may be involved in a massive cover up of his failed leadership as board chairman overseeing the Chicago Annenberg Challenge.

In any case, do the Obama people really think this is smart politics? Obama generated big political trouble previously with his bitter comments on working class resentments (remarks that were widely perceived to be based in Marxist sensibilities). The candidate himself resides in a million-dollar mansion, in Chicago’s tony Hyde Park neighborhood (where few people of color reside, not to mention the lumpen proletariat). He purchased his seven-figure abode through the good offices of convicted felon Tony Rezko. And for good measure, the Obamas provide their children with elite private education, at the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools, where the tuition costs from $15,528 for kindergarten to $20,445 for high school!

The truth is that Obama’s had difficulties connecting with average Americans all year, and his appeal to class warfare goes against traditional American support for free markets; current polling indicates that citizens overwhelmingly “prefer that the government focus on improving overall economic conditions and the jobs situation in the United States as opposed to taking steps to distribute wealth more evenly among Americans.”

To top it all off, the left’s attack on McCain is essentially dishonest: “McCain himself doesn’t own any property and isn’t “rich”, and Cindy and her family earned their money honestly.”

After weeks of collapsing numbers in presidential preference surveys, Obama and his left-wing partisans are naturally pumped at the prospect of a potent smear against John McCain. Unfortunately, class warfare has never been a winner in American politics, and even now, in an ostensibly Democratic year, the left’s going to need something bit more powerful than a couple of misplaced condominiums if they hope to retake the White House.

~cross-posted at American Power

I say good for John McCain to criticize what can only be described as political opportunism by Sen. Obama. At the Saddleback forum, Obama said his decision to oppose the War in Iraq was his most difficult–even though he wasn’t even in the Senate at the time, and by the time he was running for the Senate, he was able to gain a great deal of popularity opposing what was already an unpopular war.

“With less than three months to go before the election, a lot of people are still trying to square Sen. Obama’s varying positions on the surge in Iraq. First, he opposed the surge and confidently predicted that it would fail. Then he tried to prevent funding for the troops who carried out the surge,” McCain said.

“Not content to merely predict failure in Iraq, my opponent tried to legislate failure.”

McCain was speaking to veterans, and was appearing confident after his stellar performance at Saddleback with Rev. Rick Warren.

Randy Scheunemann, who is John McCain’s top foreign policy advisor, has been in the spotlight this last week due to his past lobbying ties to the Georgian government. Critics have alleged that Scheunemann’s previous dealings have contributed to war in the Caucasus.

This morning’s Los Angeles Times includes a feature story on Scheunemann, with the bottom line being that the revolving door between interest group work and campaign advising is non-controversial:

Ed Davis, director of research at Common Cause, said Scheunemann’s move from lobbyist to advisor is common. Foreign governments, companies, labor unions and other organizations spent a record $2.8 billion to lobby for favorable policies in Washington last year, records show.

“Unfortunately, it’s the way business is done,” Davis said.

But Kathryn Dunn Tenpas, a political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, contended that it’s unreasonable to ban paid experts from advising candidates. “If you rule out people who lobby, you probably rule out a lot of talent and connections,” she said.

For critics, Scheunemann’s case is less about conflict of interest than it is about his foreign policy positions as a hawk on national defense. He’s seen as a key “neocon” who helped hoodwink the nation on the “disastrous” folly of war in Iraq.

The fact is that the Scheunemann story is small potatoes, and has been pumped up by war opponents hoping for an advantageous gotcha moment against the GOP.

~cross-posted at American Power

~by Jack Kelly

Alaska Governor Sarah Palin

Who? When?

Republicans including, I imagine, Sen. McCain himself are asking these questions about his selection of a vice presidential candidate.

Ideally, a presidential candidate wants a running mate who will help him or her win the election, and (maybe) to govern afterwards. But most will settle for a veep who isn’t a drag on the ticket, as Dan Quayle was for the first President Bush.

Traditionally, a presidential nominee has chosen a running mate to balance the ticket geographically, or to appease a faction of the party. The most successful example of this was when John F. Kennedy picked Lyndon Johnson, though neither liked the other, and LBJ joined the ticket only because he thought Kennedy would lose.

Bill Clinton broke with this tradition when he chose another young (purported) moderate from a neighboring southern state. By picking Al Gore, he hoped to reinforce his campaign theme of generational change.

Which way will Sen. McCain go? The potential running mates most often discussed have downsides nearly as great as their upsides. Gov. Tim Pawlenty helps only in Minnesota, and not enough, according to current polls, to make a difference there. Sen. McCain’s friend Sen. Joe Lieberman would bring in some moderate Democrats, but could further antagonize conservatives already suspicious of Sen. McCain. Gov. Romney would have little appeal to working class whites unhappy with Sen. Obama, and evangelicals fret about that Mormon thing. A Huckabee nomination would irritate economic and foreign policy conservatives as much as it would please evangelicals.

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal is a rising star. But he’s only 36, and he’s been governor for less than a year.
There is one potential running mate who has virtually no down side. Those conservatives who’ve heard of her were delighted to learn that McCain advance man Arthur Culvahouse was in Alaska recently, because they surmised he could only be there to discuss the vice presidential nomination with Gov. Sarah Palin.

At 44, Sarah Louise Heath Palin is both the youngest and the first female governor in Alaska’s relatively brief history as a state. She’s also the most popular governor in America, with an approval rating that has bounced around 90 percent.

This is due partly to her personal qualities. When she was leading her underdog Wasilla high school basketball team to the state championship in 1982, her teammates called her “Sarah Barracuda” because of her fierce competitiveness.

Two years later, when she won the “Miss Wasilla” beauty pageant, she was also voted “Miss Congeniality” by the other contestants.

Sarah Barracuda. Miss Congeniality. Fire and nice. A happily married mother of five who is still drop dead gorgeous. And smart to boot.

But it’s mostly because she’s been a crackerjack governor, a strong fiscal conservative and a ferocious fighter of corruption, especially in her own party.

Ms. Palin touches other conservative bases, some of which Sen. McCain has been accused of rounding. Track, her eldest son, enlisted in the Army last Sept. 11. She’s a lifetime member of the National Rifle Association who hunts, fishes and runs marathons. A regular churchgoer, she’s staunchly pro-life.

Kimberley Strassel of the Wall Street Journal said Sen. McCain should run against a corrupt, do-nothing Congress, a la Harry Truman. If he should choose to do so, Gov. Palin would make an excellent partner “The landscape is littered with the bodies of those who have crossed Sarah,” pollster Dave Dittman told the Weekly Standard’s Fred Barnes.

Sen. Barack Obama’s support has plunged recently among white women. Many Hillary Clinton supporters accuse him — I think unfairly — of being sexist. Having Sarah Palin on the ticket could help Sen. McCain appeal to these disgruntled Democrats.

Running mates usually aren’t named until the convention. But if Sen. McCain should name Gov. Palin earlier, it would give America more time to get to know this extraordinary woman. And because she’s at least a dozen feature stories waiting to be written, she could help him dominate the news between now and the conventions.

Another reason for selecting Sarah Palin early would be to force Barack Obama to make a mistake. He’d have to rule out choosing someone like Virginia Sen. Jim Webb as his running mate, for fear of exacerbating charges of sexism. And if he chose a woman other than Hillary, the impression Democrats are wimpy would be intensified.

Joanne Hanley, superintendent of the Flight 93 Memorial Project, cannot answer the damning facts about the crescent design (now called a broken circle), so she has decided to slander the people who are pointing them out. In a speech at the Memorial Project’s August 2nd meeting, she cited a list of “threats” she had received from critics, saying for instance that her “career would be destroyed.”

In defense of Superintendent Hanley, Flight 93 family member Calvin Wilson expressed his disgust at the violent threats and charged that critics were acting like the terrorists themselves. Three Pennsylvania newspapers covered Hanley’s claims to have been threatened, one editorialized against the uncivilized critics, and a Memorial Project press release highlighted Wilson’s outraged response to the supposed threats.

It is all a lie. Here is the Letter to the Editor that Alec Rawls just sent to the duped Pennsylvania newspapers, exposing Superintendent Hanley’s deception:

A warning is not a threat. A warning is to protect against a threat.

As the lead organizer of the movement to stop the crescent design, I can tell you who made the statements that Superintendent Hanley was complaining about. I recognized every one of the phrases she cited as coming from myself. It is ME who Joanne Hanley is accusing of making threats, an accusation that is not just false, but grotesquely dishonest.

What Joanne Hanley is casting as threats were WARNINGS, trying to alert her to the threat posed by architect Paul Murdoch and his scheme to plant a giant Mecca-oriented crescent on the Flight 93 crash site. This is one of Superintendent Hanley’s excuses for refusing to heed warnings about the crescent design. She pretends that warnings are threats and hence SHOULD NOT be listened to.

When I couldn’t get Hanley to look to the facts for the country’s sake, I tried to appeal to her instinct for self-preservation, warning her of the personal consequences of Murdoch’s attempt to stab a terrorist memorial mosque into the heartland of America. (That is the meaning of a crescent that Muslims face into to face Mecca: it is the central feature of a mosque.)

As I put it in a March 2006 email to both Superintendent Hanley and Project Manager Jeff Reinbold:

I have been trying to save your lives and your careers for six months. It is not too late for you. You can still do your jobs and investigate the basic facts I have warned you about, like the Mecca-orientation of Murdoch’s original Crescent of embrace, and the continued presence of Murdoch’s original crescent in the redesign.

Shortly after this email, Joanne Hanley told me why she was not concerned about the almost-exact Mecca orientation of the giant crescent. In a conference call with Jeff Reinbold, she told me that: “It isn’t exact. That’s one we talked about. It has to be exact.” (The giant crescent points 1.8° north of Mecca, ± .1°.)

If she had admitted to the public what she was admitting in private—that the giant crescent does indeed point almost exactly to Mecca—it would have been okay. The people of Pennsylvania would be able to decide for themselves whether a giant Mecca-oriented crescent makes an acceptable memorial to the victims of Islamic terrorism, so long as it does not point EXACTLY at Mecca. Instead, the Memorial Project decided instead to deceive the public, sending an academic fraud from the University of Texas to assure the press that there is no such thing as the direction to Mecca:

Daniel Griffith, a geospatial information sciences professor at the University of Texas at Dallas, said anything can point toward Mecca, because the earth is round. [Post Gazette, “Flight 93 memorial draws a new round of criticism,” August 18, 2007.]

Just as I warned Superintendent Hanley that her career was in jeopardy, I also warned Dr. Griffith that his career would be destroyed if he did not correct this blatant disinformation. Like Hanley, Griffith too interpreted my warning as a threat, as if it would be ME who was responsible for the harm to his reputation, when he was covering up evidence of an enemy plot by lying about basic geometry, pretending that there is no direction between two points on planet earth.

In spite of the Memorial Project’s active cover-up of Murdoch’s plot, I continued to treat Superintendent Hanley as what she is: a fellow countryman aboard a hijacked airplane who is in need of rescue. As I put it in another email to Superintendent Hanley last November:

I don’t want you to be hurt here. There is only one bad guy in this story: Paul Murdoch. I want to help everyone else get off of this hijacked airplane. … I am not your enemy. I am your friend. I am the one who has been trying to save you, for two damned years, and I still am, despite your persistent public slanders against me.

Is it even POSSIBLE to be clearer? A warning is not a threat. A warning is to protect someone from a threat, as my communications spelled out over and over. For Joanne Hanley to pretend that these warnings about the threat she is facing were threats in themselves is deliberate dishonesty. For her to tell Calvin Wilson that these attempts to protect her from Murdoch’s plot were violent threats against her, prompting Wilson to use his status as a family member to attack critics on this dishonest basis, is even worse.

Joanne Hanley is not the only person I am warning. Every Pennsylvanian is aboard this hijacked airplane. How can the newspapers of Pennsylvania let stand a fraudulent claim that there is no such thing as the direction to Mecca? How can the educated people of Pennsylvania, the math teachers, the college students, the politicians, let such a fraud stand, when every one of you knows that Muslims face Mecca for prayer?

If Pennsylvanians continue to be willfully blind to easily verifiable evidence of an enemy plot in your own back yard, history will not be kind to you.

Alec Rawls

Palo Alto CA

August 12, 2008

Morality requires trust in truth

Imagine if one of the passengers on Flight 93 was told that if they did not retake the airplane, they would be killed when the terrorists flew the airplane into a building. If the passenger was Joanne Hanley, she would say: “Stop threatening me!”

Any excuse to avoid the truth, no matter how nonsensical or even suicidal. A photo-negative of the fighting spirit of Flight 93.

Asked by Pilate to account for himself, Jesus answered: “To this end was I born, and for this cause came I into the world, that I should bear witness unto the truth.” (Jn. 18:37.) Jesus wasn’t a witness for the truth only sometimes, or only about matters of salvation. He proceeded from the factual truth of every situation that crossed his path, and called upon the rest of us to similarly trust in truth.

Secular moral reason demands the same thing. Anyone who thinks that it can somehow be right or in their interest to avoid or suppress the truth will through that avoidance of the truth become divorced from reality, with the inevitable effect that their ideas about what is right or in their interest can only be wrong. This is the irrationality of the Memorial Project. They proceed on the assumption that the crescent design is innocent, while self-consciously covering up evidence that it is not.

This malfeasance puts the rest of our society to the test. All of the people who we pay to check and report the facts: government, academia and the media, are all desperately trying to suppress the truth. That leaves it up to the rest of us to witness and communicate the truth about Murdoch’s plot. (Some basic facts, and how to verify them for yourself, posted here.)

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Paris Hilton energy plan is actually pretty "hot"

I thought the Paris Hilton response to the John McCain ad was brilliant. Not sure if I should give her too much credit, but the fact that she (and her writers) responded so well is pretty impressive. Wow, I never thought I’d say “Paris Hilton” and “impressive” in the same paragraph.

But it was. Her energy policy is dead on, too. Something McCain has not been able to vocalize. In fact, something the GOP has not been able to vocalize.

Hell, even I didn’t vocalize it as well as Paris, sadly.

I’ll add to it, though. Paris said we need offshore drilling to carry us over until the new technologies (wind, solar) can get up to speed. Bravo, says I!

However, I would add to this that we need to start building new, better, safer, cleaner nuclear plants as well. And the government would be justified in subsidizing the building of cleaner, safer coal plants as well. It’s not like we’re going to up and stop using coal, so we might as well do it safely and as clean as possible.

(Mining, of course, will remain dangerous until better safety methods are adopted or enforced.)

Now hat tip in order to My Vast Right Wing Conspiracy which has this to say about Paris’s ad:

First, she picks at McCain a bit. That’s fair. He picked at her in his ad. She didn’t get nasty or mean. She poked and made fun. Then she makes it all about her in a positive way. She’s running for president now she guesses. Oh, and once she reads about the best place to tan, she has an oil plan. A plan that I will point out may not work, but already has more IQ behind it than Obama’s.

The saddest part of this is she shows more intelligence in this ad than Obama has ever shown. And she delivered it without notes or a teleprompter. Barack can’t do that! Now, I know the funny or die guys had their hand in it. But still, this is funny and quite frankly a nice distraction while the media pulls everything out to make Obama’s “inflate your tires and you’ll never have to fill up again” policy seem intelligent.

That’s exactly right. Obama has not had one single good comeback. He even denounced the New York Times cover, which was drawn to, you know, help him prove that the accusations against him (of being Muslim, of his wife being a terrorist, etc.) were BS. He should have made it his own, like Paris did with this ad, rather than cry about it! Come on, Barack, you’ve got the oratorical skills…now what about a sense of humor?

~by Churchill’s Parrot

I need to update my morning post on Stephen Biddle, Michael O’Hanlon, and Kenneth Pollack’s new article at Foreign Affairs, “Standing Down as Iraq Stands Up.”

As noted, the piece isn’t all that impressive. Most of the analysis seems somewhat behind the curve of events, and the conclusion’s basically the authors’ attempt to curry favor within the Democratic foreign policy establishment by re-floating the “Bush lied” meme on the origins of the deployment.

Well, the antiwar bloggers aren’t too happy no matter the motives. Indeed, this liberal warhawk-neocon triumvirate is being attacked just like the old days, although not just as war cheerleaders for the GOP imperialist project, but as enablers of American war crimes in Iraq to boot!

The meme’s getting a lot of play, but Spencer Ackerman’s attack is the most vociferous:

Matt Yglesias is on vacation until his new ThinkProgress blog launches August 11. But he IMs to ensure I don’t miss this argument in the new Steve Biddle/Mike O’Hanlon/Ken Pollack Iraq piece in Foreign Affairs:

It is worth noting that separation resulting from sectarian cleansing was not the chief cause of the reduction in violence, as some have claimed. Much of Iraq remains intermingled but increasingly peaceful. And whereas a cleansing argument implies that casualties should have gone down in Baghdad, for example, as mixed neighborhoods were cleansed, casualties actually went up consistently during the sectarian warfare of 2006. Cleansing may have reduced the violence somewhat in some places, but it was not the main cause.

I had to reread this to make sure I didn’t misunderstand. Ethnic cleansing is a violent process of extirpating members of a rival ethnicity or sect. If the ethnic cleansing occurred in 2006, of course casualties went up consistently. This argument makes no sense.

But there’s actually a broader point to make. Ethnic cleansing is a crime against humanity. The U.S. quite rightly intervened in the Balkans in the 1990s to stop it. The horrors of ethnic cleansing are unfathomable to those who haven’t experienced them. What you really, really shouldn’t do is treat other people’s ethnic cleansing as a debaters’ point. It’s perverse, isn’t it, the way that ethnic cleansing that occurred during a U.S. occupation can be treated so nonchalantly by Washington polemicists.

I’d be remiss not to send a quick message to Yglesias: Dude, take some time off. You’re going to be swamped with that new, nasty gig at Think Progress.

But back to the debate at hand!

Actually, it’s not illogical for sectarian violence to have dropped if the term “cleansing” is recognized in its very common useage as a broad shorthand for the consolidation of ethnic neighborhoods and the internal displacement of populations from their homes. Iraq’s ethnic cleansing has not generally been seen as genocidal. Indeed, surge proponents using this shorthand terminology have been savagely attacked for allegedly seeking to minimize the refugee tragedy of “millions of Iraqis being robbed of their homes.”

The fact is that the antiwar hordes have never accepted the COIN strategy of President George Bush and General David Petraeus. The victory of the beefed-up troop contingents along with the tactical adjustments on the ground have long been slandered as an alleged “false narrative” of success. Just over a week ago some of the most implacable Bush-bashers on the left smeared success under the surge as a myth, or that perhaps it has “worked tactically, but hasn’t succeeded strategically, at least not yet.”

Yet now, with all the mainstream political actors accepting the new realities of Iraq - including both John McCain and Barack Obama - most of the antwar contingents are seeking to push the war debate past the question of victory to that of culpability in alleged American atrocities.

This all ties into the big push on the left for “accountability” of the Bush administration foreign policy decisions, such as the treatment of enemy combatants at Guantanamo Bay, as well as the domestic surveillance operations and the question of telecom immunity.

Ideally, for war opponents, Bush administration “criminals” would be prosecuted for war crimes under a Barack Obama administration come January 2009. What’s most likely to happen, in the advent of an Obama regimes, is that Congress would establish a “commission on torture” to investigate alleged wrong-doing under the Bush-Cheney years. Yet, the recent hard-left uproar over Obama-advisor Cass Sunstein’s recent dismissal of war crimes prosecutions indicates that the antiwar forces want a bit more than “truth and reconcilliation.”

Thus, today’s uproar over the Biddle, O’Hanlon, and Pollack essay can be seen as building more war crimes charges against the administration.

The whole thing may well end being a bunch of sound and fury, signifying nothing, especially as Barack Obama’s been dropping in the polls like an anchor.

On the other hand, the war crimes push is an international movement, and U.S. bloggers like Ackerman, Ezra Klein, and the crew at Newshoggers - with no substantive loyalty to the principle of American sovereignty - would like nothing more than the establishment of a universal jurisdiction of vengeance and star chamber prosecutions of Bush’s neo-imperialist cabal next year.

~cross-posted at American Power

Obama Urges Germany To Remain Committed To The Fight In Afghanistan, But Can’t Explain His Own Lack Of Leadership On The Issue

In His Berlin Speech, Obama Urged Germany To Remain Committed To Winning The War In Afghanistan:

Obama: “This is the moment when we must renew our resolve to rout the terrorists who threaten our security in Afghanistan, and the traffickers who sell drugs on your streets. No one welcomes war. I recognize the enormous difficulties in Afghanistan. But my country and yours have a stake in seeing that NATO’s first mission beyond Europe’s borders is a success. For the people of Afghanistan, and for our shared security, the work must be done. … The Afghan people need our troops and your troops; our support and your support to defeat the Taliban and al Qaeda, to develop their economy, and to help them rebuild their nation. We have too much at stake to turn back now.” (Sen. Barack Obama, Remarks At Victory Column, Berlin, Germany, 7/24/08)

But Obama Has Failed To Lead As Chair Of The Subcommittee With Jurisdiction Over NATO Operations In Afghanistan:

Obama Has Served As Chairman Of The Subcommittee On European Affairs From 2007 - 2008.<