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Experts say the threat of domestic terrorism is growing
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An 'urgency': Sensing threats to institutions of society, church leaders make declaration
Bitter pill: GOP senators swallow hard as judicial nominee David Hamilton is confirmed
Just friends: Obama’s Asia agenda steered clear of any tough talk on human rights abuses 
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Today’s quote is from a movie: “I trust everyone. It’s the devil inside them I don’t trust.”
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back to top48 Comments to “Whirled Views 7.26”
The Italian Job?
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Stella Bridger played by Charlize Theron in the Italian Job.
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We are back from yet another successful camping excursion. No sign of Lewis and Clark (though we had ample discussion of them as that is an area they went through) but we did see deer, moose, snakes, and water ouzels. After a wide range of discussion covering everything from gardening and recipes to world wars (one of our fellows is a WWII vet) the kids came out with this as their most important lesson of the week: Mr. B with all his experiences and illnesses (feints into Okinawa as a decoy, commercial Alaska fisherman, log truck driver, diabetes, cancer, etc) is sure kind and he thinks God is the most important thing. Good lesson. For my part, I see there are more dishes to do and does nobody around here but me know when the trash bag is full?
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Fox News. Fair and Balanced? Not quite.
Matthews: “Did you see FOX television as a tool when you were in the White House? As a useful avenue to get your message out?”
McClellan: “I make a distinction between the journalists and the commentators. Certainly there were commentators and other, pundits at FOX News, that were useful to the White House.” […] That was something we at the White House, yes, were doing, getting them talkng points and making sure they knew where we were coming from.
Matthews: “So you were using these commentators as your spokespeople.”
McClellan: “Well, certainly.”
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Have you heard John McCain’s new campaign slogan? ‘Hey guys, I’m over here!’”
Jay Leno
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“Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi is calling the Bush presidency a total failure. Total failure. I don’t know, I think he’s done okay. I think he’s done okay if you don’t count Iraq, the economy, the environment, Afghanistan, the mortgage crisis. I think he’s done all right… The deficit. Gas prices. Hurricane Katrina. Illegal wire tapping…”
David Letterman
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First the Iraqi government gave Senator Barack Obama a boost by seeming to embrace his proposal for a 16-month timetable for withdrawing American troops from Iraq. But could Senator John McCain, who built his candidacy in large part on his opposition to a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq, possibly be following suit?
“I think it’s a pretty good timetable,” Mr. McCain said Friday in an interview on CNN’s “The Situation Room,’’ before adding that it should be based “on the conditions on the ground.’’
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NJLawyer, as I was reading Willful Blindness, by Andrew McCarthy, I was thinking you should be reading this. It was very interesting to me, but I confess that the details of the trials he discusses toward the end of the book sort of lost my interest in the detail. I think you would be interested. DCLawyer, too, if he’s still around. This happens across the river from you.
The burden of the book is summarized on p. 314, “In sum, trials in the criminal justice system don’t work for terrorism. They work for terrorists.”
The book is essentially about the search for, trial and conviction of the “Blind Sheikh”, Abdel Rahman and the others concerning the 1993 bombing of the WTC.
P. 143, “…the heart of the problem with using the criminal justice system as the primary weapon against international terrorism (is): There are many circumstances in which it is more important for governments to have information than to be able to use that information in court. Nevertheless, because we are a litigious society, the possession of information by the government has significant legal consequences. Once it has charged any person anywhere with a crime, the government is generally required to disclose to that defendant any information it has learned-even from a confidential informant immersed in a crucial undercover operation-if that information might be helpful to the defense. … Helpful also includes any documentary evidence in the government’s possession that a court might deem ‘material in preparing the defense’-whether that information is exculpatory or not.” Ben Laden got a list of 200 presumed co-conspirators due to this trial.
The important point is that our Supreme Court either doesn’t know this, or doesn’t care. I’m convinced that there are people in high places who don’t care about the security of Americans.
There is much more to this.
His vocabulary is larger than mine.
For those of you who wouldn’t deem this book worth buying; let me suggest that you go to Borders, take the book and read Chapter 25 (eight pages), it’s important.
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The Steven Emerson McCarthy mentions a couple of times is “Max”, Rita Katz’s (Anonymous) boss in Terorist Hunter, and the information was probably obtained by Katz.
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Good news folks. Last night I spent two hours talking with 3 Obama supporters and at the endo of our quality engagement about the facts, I was able to talk all three of them into skipping Obama and voting for McCain.
The key was to find Obama supporters who don’t anything about what he stands for and what he doesn’t stand for and then tell him where he does or doesn’t. It’s amazing that all 3 of them said that they thought that Obama was needed so that we can change the climate of Washington. When I explained to them that even Obama hasn’t articulated what that change is going to look like, they were dumbfounded.
The only difficulty I had was trying not to make them look stupid for supporting Obama in the first place. They were embarrassed when they found out the truth, but I helped them save face by telling them that they still had time to change their minds.
I’m going fishing again tomorrow. They’re biting pretty good around these parts. (That was a metaphor.)
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Chas, thank you for thinking of me. I will be getting this book. I just haven’t had a minute in the past few weeks for shopping, but this week I will. I do remember when the chemist was found and attended his hearings in Newark. I stared this guy right in the eyes. There was nothing there. He simply did not care. I wouldn’t say he was amused by it all, but he wasn’t scared like most defendants. It was the cost of doing business for him. I have often wondered what those characters are thinking sitting in that prison, whether they still think it was worth it. They were all young, except for the Sheikh.
Please remember that if nothing else, all those guys were sent to the bowels of the supermax and they’re not walking free and never will.
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Awesome, Metanoia — great job!
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Chas: I’m convinced that there are people in high places who don’t care about the security of Americans.
Interesting phraseology. Nobody is a threat to the security of America.
So far, for all the bombast and bluster on both sides, the most these new enemies have managed to do is the equivalent of knocking out our two front teeth. They did manage to goad us into sacrificing a good deal of our freedom, spending a trillion or so of our money, and sacrificing 4,000 of our young people in a totally unnecessary, politically motivated attack on another country.
And eventually, this kind of ham-handed response could result in strengthening their popular support, deluding them into thinking that we are weaker and dumber than we are; it may even convince our “allies” that we are not worthy of their support.
But even so, nobody threatens the security of America.
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Metanoia,
Reminds me of this, the essential all-purpose Obama stump speech, from a poster to Mark Steyn’s blog:
“We live in the greatest nation in the history of the world, and I want you to help me change it!”
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Suffering from September 10th Syndrome, are we?
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Arcadia,
I’ve heard it said that an indicator of security is how safe a lone young woman is while walking down the street at night.
With that as a yardstick, how secure is America?
Somebody gunned down a father and his two sons in cold blood on a crowded street in broad daylight in San Fransisco last Sunday afternoon.
Who’s a threat to the nation’s security? I’d say a lot of people, from terrorists to gangs to muddle-headed authorities and those who put them in power, to the guys who sired all the babies born out of wedlock in the past year (67%!) statistically dooming them to a life of poverty and crime (our prisons are full of adult fatherless boys).
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As the commercial says, “Doing nothing is the worst thing you can do.”
Those who fault Bush never come up with a suggestion.
They want to take the European approach. Ignore it, maybe it won’t happen on my watch.
This is the same approach they take to the energy problem.
I see from CNN website that Iran is hanging thirty people tomorrow. Twenty of them are guilty of drug smuggling and murder. Others are guilty such henious crimes of associating with someone of the opposite sex with whom they aren’t married.
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I am looking for anyone’s rebuttal to Llama’s long and good posts about what happened to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Where are the contrarian views?
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Bob, there aren’t any.
John Denney, I think it was Ayaan Hirst Ali, in Infidel where the mother warned the daughter, “A woman alone is like a piece of meat in the sun.”
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Here’s a link to a good short article on the importance of protecting human life as an enduring decisive issue in today’s climate (titled: “No Life, No Justice,” by Mark Earley, 7/25/2008. Subtitle: “Sanctity of Life Is Foundational):
http://www.breakpoint.org/listingarticle.asp?ID=8289
Here’s a couple quotes from it: ”
* “All human rights are predicated first upon the right to life.”
* “The so-called single-issue, pro-life voters are not single issue at all. Why? Because the dignity and sanctity of human life is a thread that connects virtually all humanitarian causes.”
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#4, Godlumps,
[Chris?] Matthews asking Scott McClellan what he thinks about FOX News is a bit like Fidel Castro asking his brother Raoul what he thinks about the free market.
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“Start adding that up, and four defendants with the seemingly interchangeable Arabic names that still ping oddly on western ears, start to look like forty, or more. But there weren’t forty. In fact, in the eight years between the World Trade Center bombing and it’s destruction, the high profile court cases that constituted the Clinton administration’s counter terrorism strategy resulted in the conviction of exactly twenty-nine terrorists. Twenty nine. For a frame of reference, consider that since military hostilities began after 9/11, the United States forces have often killed and captured in a single day of combat more jihadists than were prosecuted throughout the 1990’s.”
McCarthy, Willful Blindness, p. 20, Italics in the original.
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re: #19
Chas,
I see; a religion of piece.
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Chas: They rounded up many thousands of people, many of whom were turned in for cash rewards by other Iraqis and others who just looked crosswise at their “liberators”. They then incarcerated them in Abu Ghraib, which used to be Saddam’s hellhole, Guantanamo, and the dungeons of other countries most likely to torture them.
They also rounded up thousands of other vaguely suspicious Middle Easterners (and a few US citizens), legally in this country and kept them locked up, without benefit of counsel, charges, or access to courts for agonizing indefinite periods.
All of which makes me wonder what exactly we are supposedly fighting to protect. The rule of law? Due process? The right not to be rounded up in such a manner? Freedom from tyranny? Respect for the concept of innocent unless proven guilty?
An awful lot of the rest of the world is asking the same questions.
But it seems to me that you have fairly little respect for these freedoms and precious revolutionary ideas for which our founders shed so much blood.
Your true patriotism is highly suspect if you are willing to turn over absolute power to any executive.
Bob: I missed llama’s posts on Fannie and Freddie, but I’m willing to bet a lot of money that either he or an immediate family member has benefitted from the lower interest rates that those institutions make possible.
And I also bet that he would protest mightily if someone suggested that one appropriate response to actions of the executives who mismanaged those agencies so badly as to potentially jeopardize the solvency of the entire country might be to incarcerate and fine those executives.
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There is a special report on FoxNews.com about honor killings. If you read through the examples, you will see that the father’s either strangled or stabbed their daughters (one with mom’s help). These are very “personal” methods of murder. You have to touch your victim to do the act. Unbelievable.
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NJL: Just another fine leftover practice of the Abrahamic tradition.
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Metanoia: When I explained to them that even Obama hasn’t articulated what that change is going to look like, they were dumbfounded.
I would be too, since that is such a blatant lie.
Obama’s Web site contains a number of detailed and comprehensive policy positions he holds that articulates what the change is going to look like. He’s touched on it in speeches and debates, and put it in great detail on a site where anyone with a Web connection can explore at leisure.
I hope those people you conned will wise up before Election Day.
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Metanoia; Please list three specific ways in which McCain should be superior to Obama for an Obama supporter. Assume they’re comfortable with Obama’s position on abortion (they wouldn’t be supporting him in he first place if they weren’t) and tell me three specific ways on other issues or in other qualities that McCain is the better choice.
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A flotilla of NASA probes has solved the 30-year mystery behind the most colorful aurora displays on Earth and the
explosive magnetic “substorms” that spawn them.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/space/20080724/sc_space/secretofcolorfulaurorasrevealed
Don’t believe the so-called “scientific” explanation. It’s obviously God’s Light Show.
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Why “drill more” is not and never will be a viable long-term solution to the energy crisis.
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I read two pages of the link and it seems to be the same old thing. Nothing explains why more drilling won’t alleviate the oil shortage. Everyone wants oil. That’s a given. They did make a correct observation however, “our present crisis is due to decisions made a decade ago.” If we had started drilling then, we would have oil now; not at $2.00 maybe, but not $4.00 either.
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Chas: I read two pages of the link and it seems to be the same old thing. Nothing explains why more drilling won’t alleviate the oil shortage.
Yes, it does. In this passage: Investment slackened just as finding new supplies was becoming more difficult and costly. Most of the world’s big, easy-to-tap fields have already been discovered and largely drained.
Some analysts argue that peak oil production has already been reached. Others say the peak remains a ways off but perhaps not very far. Though capital spending by big oil companies has again picked up pace in the past couple of years, spurred by higher prices, exploration is still falling short.
“It’s not that we’re going to run out of oil or hydrocarbons, but it’s not going to become available as fast as uninhibited, unrestricted demand,” said Sadad Husseini, a consultant and former petroleum geologist at Saudi Aramco.
Just two decades ago, the world could pump 15 percent more oil than it needed. Today, that spare production capacity has practically vanished — it’s now about 2 percent beyond the world’s total daily consumption of 85.5 million barrels. That makes the market very sensitive to rumors about anything that might endanger existing production.
Do you not get it? The oil isn’t there anymore! As the easy fields get depleted, what’s left is harder to get, more expensive to get and therefore, less able to drive prices back down. And it’s only going to get worse with time.
I’ve read claims that there might be another 15 or so years’ worth offshore in the U.S. … ok, let’s get that, and then what? 15 years from now, we’re right back here and still need a solution that moves us off of oil entirely.
You may well no longer be here 15 years … I likely will no longer be here in 30 or 40 years. So those short term solutions may sound fine to us. But there are future generations to consider.
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SteveG, you are correct in that it’s my children and grandchildren I worry about. Barring a disaster, I will survive whatever comes.
However, some of you always talk about alternatives. We have discussed this extensively. I always ask, what is the alternative?
You always say, “alternative energy”.
I ask, “How many windmills on Cape Cod does it “take to provied power for Boston?”
“How many solar collecters to provide power for Fort Worth?”
How many coconuts to take a 757 from London to Amsterdam?
“What will the cattle eat when we turn the corn into fuel?”
While you are working on perpetual motion, zero friction, and water powered engines, we need something to drive a petroleum based economy.
A 55 mph speed limit won’t do it.
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If someone is having a heart attack, he needs immediate emergency care. At the same time, if his lifestyle includes poor nutrition and excessive calorie consumption; sedentary couch potato/lack of exercise behavior; smoking and excessive alcohol consumption, he needs to make long-term life style changes. Neither precludes or conflicts with the other requirement.
The analogy is not perfect (analogies seldom are), but I think the point holds. Our world needs to attend to both meeting immediate energy needs and long-term changes in both how much energy we use, how efficiently we use it, how we generate it, and so on.
Fighting wars (real and flame) probably wastes energy, but that’s what we most like to do.
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Random – Good analogy. Thanks.
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SteveG #32 The energy crisis is something we can all agree on.
In the book ‘End of Oil’ it estimates that it will take 10 years of oil to produce new forms of energy. If we are only 15 years away from the End of Oil, then if we don’t actively start production of new forms of energy in the next 5 years, we won’t have enough energy to produce new energy.
Politics is to blame for inaction on energy. Both candidates give lip service to this issue as all candidates before them. My fear is that neither will take it seriously. Obama prances around a few wind farms while McCain merely says drill, drill, drill.
House Democrats have halted new energy production. Kennedy complains about windmills in his backyard. In NH we pay twice what everyone else pays for electricity because of legal battles with environmentalists who chained themselves to fences at our nuclear power plant. Environmentalists killed geothermal in Hawaii because the wires were ugly. Give me a break!
Will politicians ever stop politicizing energy and start taking this crisis seriously? Not until every last drop of energy is gone.
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SteveG #27, 28:
I’m not interested in entering into a debate or discussion about Obama with you. You are already convinced and wouldn’t accept my contributions anyway.
The Obama site is filled with a lot of fluff about what he will do, but very, very little about how he will do it except to state that he will pass some kind of legislation (big government) for this or for that.
I am more interested in the bottom line of what all of this will cost and it will cost plenty.
I just pointed out to my friends the simple fact that Obama is all talk and no action. The only reason he is running for president at this particular juncture is because he has no record. Give him a full term as a Senator and he will do one of two things:
1. He’ll continue to vote present (but non committed) to anything of substance, or
2. He will be exposed for the ultra liberal that he is, but this time with a track record.
In either case, he won’t be electable in 2012. This is his only chance. And if he can continue to pull the wool over the eyes of a majority of American citizens, he just might win. But until that happens, I owe it to my friends and family to oppose and expose him for what he is. All flash and dash and no cash.
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Metanoia: If government expense is what you are really concerned about, why the heck would you ever vote Republican again. Over the eight years of the Republican Presidency and mostly Republican Congress, the budget has been driven into deep deficits, the national debt has exploded and we have gotten a whole lot less government for our money.
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Arcadia:
A bit of clarification. For me the bottom line is only partly financial. When I speak of the bottom line I am inclined to include:
1. The kind of judges that will be selected to serve on the Supreme Court
2. The cost of the learning curve for an inexperienced blank slate of a politician that Obama is.
3. The continued obstruction of a liberal politician who will not support domestic drilling for more oil, even though the answer to our energy problem includes more domestic drilling in the short run while developing other sources for the future.
4. The cost of continuing to court appeasers in Europe rather than maintaining our position of military strength and the edge that military strength give us diplomatically.
5. The cost of naively believing that we can “talk sense” to terrorists and their states supporters.
6. The cost of enlarging existing entitlement programs and creating new ones that will continue to put a larger tax burden on all Americans.
The “costs” are multidimensional.
I hope that helps you see my perspective better.
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Arcadia, it is truly cold to use strangle your own child or stab her death. You would think a person would use a gun rather than struggle with your child who is your victim. It’s very hard for me to wrap my head around this sort of thing no matter where it comes from.
I can “understand” the wife who drives over her husband with a Mercedes or the husband who shoots the wife. That’s less “personal” and I think that’s why they can actually do it. I can’t understand these methods of murder being used on one’s child. These aren’t even cases where a person is in the heat of passion, angry yes, but these are planned murders, and in the one case, the mother held the daughter down.
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What about this new book “Scared to Death?” Any merit? I hear it tells the truth about global warming and AlGore’s misstatements in his Inconvenient Truth movie.
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Metanoia: I assume you voted for Bush who having never held federal office was an equally if not blanker slate? He did a truly spectacular job of ignoring terrorism until it interrupted his reading one day.
And when you talk of “appeasers” are you seriously comparing today’s terrorist threat to the Axis armies? Or the Soviet Union of yore?
And in case you hadn’t noticed that your current President is busily talking to ALL the members of the current “Axis of Evil”.
And as for your anti-liberal rant, I guess maybe you have no objection to huge deficits and debts as long as the money is going to business rather than thos whom you deem unworthy?
NJL: As noted, deliberately killing one own child is part of all of the time honored Abrahamic traditions. I’m sure I don’t have to post the various pieces of Judeo-Christian scripture honoring and even demanding such actions. Some of the time it is gussied up as “sacrifice” or penance, but mostly it’s just deliberate killing for violation of one or another divinely delivered law.
The simple truth is that neither the bible nor the koran is a very good place to look for family values.
I too find such killings uniquely abhorrent, but in the name of faith all manner of atrocities become possible.
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Arcadia,
If you can find a better place than Christianity for good family values, I sure would like to hear about it!
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HOW TO STEAL $1,000,000,000
http://federaltimes.com/index.php?S=3620576
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Cheryl: The human heart. I believe we instinctively love our families. We do not need any particular religion to tell us how to do that. And we certainly do not need any religion to interfere with those normal loving relationships. Sadly, it often does, as doctrinal disputes can seriously disrupt and alienate family members. I had an Irish grandfather who completely disowned, shunned and ignored my mother because she strayed from his particular faith. It embittered both of them.
One thing that most of modern Christianity does do which I like is encourage families to spend some time together once a week; something that cannot be said about other religions which separate the sexes.
But overall, the Christian god seems to be a jealous god and normal human family (and other) relationships must take a back seat to obeisance. Jesus himself said it, didn’t he?
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Arcadia #42:
I’m sorry you misunderstood my comments as a rant. I’ll try to address your objections.
1. Yes I voted for Bush, again because of the alternative. I didn’t think that Gore or Kerry were better choices. Bush had executive experience as a governor. Obama was a community organizer. Coming from Chicago, I can tell you that community organizers are a dime a dozen, very ineffective, and usually only work for a few years before they move on to other things. As a State Senator Obama’s record is less than sterling and as a U.S. Senator, his record is non-existing.
2. I truly believe that islamofascism is as serious a threat as any other “ism” that hates democracy. I don’t profess to know the answers as to why Bush is talking to the “Axis of Evil”, but I can guess that the reason they are listening now is because we are talking from a position of strength. I don’t believe that the U.S. uses its strength to arbitrarily bully people around. But enemies of freedom better learn to let a sleeping dog lie.
3. If you’ve read my comments before, you will know that I believe that government and business can partner together. It is a thin rope to walk, but excessive taxation strangles an economy. The average U.S. worker now has to work approximately 5 month to pay his/her tax load. That excessive taxation is causing havoc in families as both partners have to work in order to achieve a modicum of the American dream.
4. I’m not sure who you think I “deem unworthy” but let me assure you that I have plenty of compassion for those who are truly down and out and have no problem with helping them out of my own pocket or through taxes.
5. One final thing. I’m an independent. Conservative right to be sure, but independent. When I lived in Chicago, I had little choice but to vote for many Democrats in the elections because of the dominance of Democratic politics. I try to vote for what I believe are the best from the choices I have been given.
In this election, I would have preferred someone else over Obama or McCain, but such are the choices we’ve been given.
I hope that helps keep the dialogue open.
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#45
Arcadia,
Perhaps we instinctively sense that we ought to love our families, and in many cases do love them without outside urging. But I turned to Christianity precisely because I did not love my parents and felt guilty about it, and Christianity offered hope of a power outside myself that would enable me to do what I could not on my own.
It’s easy enough to act loving when other people act lovable. And I don’t know about “the human heart” in general as I only know my own (naturally I tend to assume – often wrongly – that others would be a good deal like mine), but forgiveness does not come naturally to me. Nor does the will to say or do things that may displease other people even when I know that it is the right thing to do or say. Relationships are very difficult for me, and I doubt I would have ever dared try to have a family of my own (for fear I would be too much like my mother) if not for my faith.
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Arcadia,
Christianity tells us to stay married even when we don’t “feel” like it, and not to stray outside the marriage. It tells men to love their wives and to treat them as of extraordinary value. It tells wives to respect their husbands, and children to obey their parents. Are any of these “automatic” actions of love? How does one even define love? Christianity tells us; our instincts do not. (Now we’re being told that men “instinctively” want more than one woman over their lifetimes. I think I’d rather look to Christianity’s virtues, thank you very much.)
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