Free Britannia

VDH: Conventional Nights

quidnunc — Thur, 28 Aug 2008 05:45:20 GMT

The Triumph of the Therapeutic

Let us hope that the Republicans avoid the teary-eyed, drippy stories that almost all these Democratic speakers insist on inflicting on us: in this Oprah world, one would think that there is mass starvation, depression, and general mayhem. In every introduction, we hear that the speaker to come was poor, deprived, and a multifaceted victim. Not since reading the Attic Orators has one heard how horrible life has been to such heroic figures, who nonetheless somehow ended up in such a cruel country with big salaries, enormous homes, and influential jobs.

On Satellite Radios Potus station, they are playing clips of conventions long past, and one simply does not hear a Truman, Stevenson, or Eisenhower indulging us with tales of their own brushes with cruelty, illness, death, poverty, etc. and how only their own character allowed them to survive their absolutely singular experiences.

Eloquent Distortions

Did Clinton in his speech tonight really think that Reagan ending the Cold War was part of a 25-year long foreign-policy catastrophe, while his own record of doing nothing much about the World Trade Center bombing, Khobar Towers, the attacks on East African embassies, and the USS Cole in bin Ladens serial path to September 11 was inspired leadership?

I dont recall Clinton signing a Kyoto Treaty, or giving $15 billion for AIDs relief in Africa, or passing universal health care, or going to the UN or Congress to bomb Serbia, so why attack Bush on such similar topics?

Bidens speech drew praise, but in candor he was almost on the verge of constant tears and right on the crest of an hysterical wave. And when he talked about McCains integrity, I almost chokedgiven Bidens past complete fabrications about his nonexistent coal-mining family, serial plagiarism, and crudity when interrogating Supreme Court Justice nominees. Remember this was a politician who once boasted he would like to run for Vice President with McCain and is now accusing McCain of poor judgment, again from someone who voted against Gulf War I, and then flipped several times on the second Iraq war, and then pontificated about his bankrupt plan of trisecting Iraq.

Why evoke Georgia and Obama when Obama had a three-strike-out response: 1) initially both sides were equally at fault; 2) then go to the UN and find resolution; 3) then suggest our taking out a genocidal dictator was equivalent to Russia attacking a democracy.

And why would Biden evoke timelines as proof of Obamas wisdom on Iraq? It only reminds us that Obama wanted all troops out by March 2008 that would have ensured defeat. The only reason why there is a discussion of timelines at all is due to General Petraeuss success in stopping the violence. The present plan is Petraeuss; the notion that an Illinois Senator had any input, influence, or effect on it is ludicrous.

-snip-

(Victor Davis Hanson in the Pajamas Media, August 27, 2008)
http://pajamasmedia.com/victordavishanson/conventional-nights/

Hubris to Nemesis: Obama and his Temple

Why and how did McCain catch up? Let us count the ways: the disastrous European victory lap of Obamas; the uninspired professorial pontificating to Rick Warren; the deer-in-the-headlights serial responses to the Georgia crisis; and the McCain ads that were as cleverly effective as they were derided as childish by outraged liberals.

But perhaps the greatest consideration is Obamas Hellenic hubris, which is different than simple arrogance. Hubris is a sort of fit, a haughtiness steeped in delusions of grandeur and divinity that takes over a weak individual, and soon encourages recklessness and overreaching (at), all culminating in ruin and divine retribution (nemesis).

Forum: News from the USA

The Mainstream Moron Media

quidnunc — Thur, 28 Aug 2008 05:20:06 GMT

I believe I made a mistake when I decided not to attend the Democratic National Convention. The consequence of that decision has been that I have had to watch its highlights on national television. There the media gaggle, with few exceptions, has plangently repeated tediously and cheerlessly many things that I know to be untrue. The preeminent untruth resounding across the airways is that the Clintons are political geniuses. They are to electioneering what Ludwig van Beethoven was to the piccolo, or Slobodan Milosevic was to ethnic cleansing, to wit, consummate artists. Since the early 1990s I have sedulously researched the Clintons' life and work. My finding is that they are mediocrities in all things political, save one: huckstering. Moreover, they are accomplished hucksters solely because the media are composed of credulous ignoramuses. Do you think I am being ungentlemanly? I am not alone.

This week, after but two days of watching the media's coverage of the looming Democratic Convention, columnist Tony Blankley, a gentleman to the utmost, coined the term "the mainstream moron media." My guess is that Blankley was perfectly serene when he typed out that line. Most probably he was wearing an immaculately starched English shirt. Possibly he was wearing a tie and almost certainly he had his pants on. But really, after two days of the media's homogenized mush, enough is enough. "When I turned the TV on," Blankley writes at the outset of the convention coverage, "the political cable news shows were filled with liberal pundits, liberal anchors, liberal guest historians, liberal weather gals and guys, liberal news you can use chicks, liberal political 'strategists' (i.e. out of work Democratic National Committee gofers)." Practically everything they droned on about was stupid.

Blankley was particularly critical of the blah, blah, blah that followed the Prophet Obama's choice of Senator Joe Biden as his running mate in their Campaign for Change. Joe is a minor Washington monument, completely with stone head. He has been a senator for 36 years. He may have been a congressional page during the administration of Grover Cleveland. Yet, the mainstream moron media were in the raptures over the Prophet's bold choice.

Of course, I share Blankley's derision for the Biden edition of the Media Follies, but it is their ongoing enthusiasm for the Clintons that strikes me as most derisible. Hillary just lost a presidential bid considered for months to have been "inevitable" (though I always had my doubts as you will recall), and she lost to a political neophyte, a neighborhood organizer from Chicago. By the end of the first month of the primaries, she had blown through $100 million. She was doomed by February 5. During her extended soap opera she was personally indecisive (as was predictable), presided over a chaotic and embittered staff (again, predictable), and had no control of her reckless husband (stupendously predictable), who, contrary to the mainstream moron media, has almost never been an asset for any candidate he supported. In 2004 he campaigned for 14 candidates, twelve of whom lost but I repeat myself.

-snip-

(R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. in The American Spectator, August 28, 2008)
http://www.spectator.org/dsp_article.asp?art_id=13777

Forum: Own goals!

Doubts Over French Role in Afghanistan

quidnunc — Thur, 28 Aug 2008 04:47:34 GMT

New claims of military errors in Afghanistan threw President Sarkozy on the defensive yesterday as his Government prepares to fight a parliamentary vote on the unpopular French involvement in allied operations there.

A row is raging over the August 18 ambush that killed ten French soldiers and wounded twenty-one, with media reporting that the patrol had been underprepared and poorly protected.

The Defence Ministry denied two of the most damaging claims yesterday: that an interpreter had betrayed the patrol to the Taleban, and that four soldiers were executed after being taken prisoner at the start of the battle.

The ministry did not comment on soldiers' reports that no reconnaissance had been carried out, even though the armoured column was moving into a mountainous area 56km (35 miles) east of Kabul in which Taleban insurgents were active.

France's only two helicopters were being used by President Karzai at the time. Aerial reconnaissance was indispensable, an officer told Le Canard Enchan, an investigative weekly. But no one had yet understood that this was war.

This reinforced a remark by General Michel Stollsteiner, the French commander in the area, who said that his troops had been guilty of overconfidence when they mounted the patrol. Afghan troops in the patrol had fled when fighting started, the newspaper added.

-snip-

(Charles Bremner in The Times, August 28, 2008)
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/europe/article4622141.ece

Forum: The military forum

VDH: Farewell, NATO; America's Cold War alliance with Europe has ceased to be a fruitful one.

quidnunc — Thur, 28 Aug 2008 04:38:43 GMT

When I was growing up in the 1960s, we had a majestic Santa Rosa plum orchard on my familys farm. The trees were 40 years old and had grown to over 20 feet high. My grandfather would proudly recall how its once-bumper crops of big, sweet plums had helped him survive the Depression and a postwar fall in agricultural prices.

But by the 1960s, the towering, verdant trees were more a park than a profitable orchard. The aged limbs had grown almost too high to pick, the fruit there too few and too small to pack profitably. Yet my grandfather simply could not bring himself to bulldoze the money-losing, unproductive old orchard.

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization is like that noble Santa Rosa orchard. We all remember how NATO once saved Western Europe from the onslaught of global communism. Its success led to the present European Union. The Soviets were kept at bay. The Americans were engaged, while the postwar German colossus remained peaceful. A resurgent Europe followed, secure enough to prosper while complacent enough to slash defense expenditures and expand entitlements.

After the victory of the Cold War, NATOs raison detre became more problematic even as its theoretical reach now extended all the way to the old borders of the Soviet Union. Yet, without the Soviet menace that had prompted the alliance, what justified the continued need for transatlantic collective defense?

We saw NATOs paralysis in the European inaction over Serbias ethnic cleansing in the 1990s. When NATO finally acted to remove Slobodan Milosevic in 1999, the much-criticized intervention proved little more than a de facto American air campaign.

Article Five of NATOs charter requires its members to come to the aid of any fellow nation that is attacked. But when it was invoked after 9/11 for the first time, NATO didnt risk much other than a few European gestures such as sending surveillance planes to fly above America to fight Islamic terrorists abroad.

Australia, a non-NATO member, is doing far more to fight the Taliban than either Germany or Spain. Many Western European countries have national directives that prevent aggressive offensives against the Taliban and other Afghan insurgents, overriding NATO military doctrine.

Take away Canada, the United Kingdom, and the U.S. from Afghanistan and the collective NATO force would collapse in hours.

-snip-

(Victor Davis Hanson in National Review, August 28, 2008)
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=MmNlNzY2ZmExMjUyNWE0ZDUxNDk5NzMyNzcxYWIwMTU=

Forum: The military forum

How to Manage Savagery

quidnunc — Thur, 28 Aug 2008 04:15:08 GMT

The war radical Islam has waged on the West has been eclipsed by the war it is waging within the Muslim world. Why has this happened, and what does it mean for our foreign policy?

Islam has bloody borders. So wrote Samuel Huntington in The Clash of Civilizations?, his 1993 Foreign Affairs article later expanded (minus the question mark) into a best-selling book. Huntington argued that, eclipsing past eras of national and ideological conflict, the battle lines of the future would be drawn along the fault lines between civilizations. Here, according to Huntington, was where current and coming generations would define the all-important us versus them.

At the time of its writing, The Clash of Civilizations? had, beyond the virtues of pithiness and historical sweep, something to recommend it on purely empirical grounds. It seemed especially plausible as applied to the crescent-shaped Islamic bloc from the Maghreb to the East Indies.

In the Balkans, for example, Orthodox Serbs were at the throats of Bosnian and later Kosovar Muslims. In Africa, Muslims were either skirmishing or at war with Christians in Nigeria, Sudan, and Ethiopia. In the Caucasus, there was all-out war between Orthodox Russia and Muslim Chechnya, all-out war between Christian Armenia and Muslim Azerbaijan, and violent skirmishes between Orthodox Ossetia and Muslim Ingushetia.

In the Middle East, some 500,000 U.S. troops had intervened to expel Iraq from Kuwait. Israel had just endured several years of the first Palestinian intifada, soon to be followed by a fraudulent peace process leading, in turn, to a second and far bloodier intifada. Further to the east, Pakistan and India were at perpetual daggers drawn over Kashmir. There were tensions sometimes violent between the Hindu majority and the large Muslim minority in India, just as there were between the Christian minority and the Muslim majority in Indonesia.

For Huntington, all this was of a piece with a pattern dating at least as far back as the battle of Poitiers in 732, when Charles Martel turned back the advancing Umayyads and saved Europe for Christianity. Nor was the pattern likely to end any time soon. The centuries-old military interaction between the West and Islam is unlikely to decline, he wrote. To the contrary: It could become more virulent.

As predictions go, Huntingtons landmark thesis seemed in many ways to have been borne out by subsequent events. Long before 9/11, and long before George W. Bush came to office, anti-American hostility within the Muslim and, particularly, the Arab world was plainly on the rise. So was terrorist activity directed at U.S. targets. Meanwhile, the advent of satellite TV brought channels like al-Jazeera and Hizballahs al-Manar to millions of Muslim homes and public places, offering their audience a robust diet of anti-American, anti-Israel, and often anti-Semitic news, propaganda, and Islamist indoctrination.

It should have come as no surprise, then, that Muslim reaction to the attacks of September 11, 2001 tended toward the euphoric in striking confirmation, it would seem, of Huntingtons bold thesis. And that thesis would seem to be no less firmly established today, when opinion polls show Americas favorability ratings plummeting even in Muslim countries once relatively well-disposed toward us: in Turkey, for example, descending from 52 percent in 1999 to 12 percent in 2008, and in Indonesia from 75 percent to 37 percent in the same period (according to the Pew Global Survey). These findings are all the more depressing in light of the massive humanitarian assistance provided to Indonesia by the U.S. after the 2004 tsunami. The same might be said of Pakistan where, despite similarly critical U.S. assistance after the 2005 earthquake, already low opinions of the U.S. have sunk still further.

Nor is the phenomenon of Muslim rage directed against America alone. In Spain, the Netherlands, Great Britain, France and Germany countries with widely varying foreign policies toward, and colonial histories in, the Muslim world terrorist plots, terrorist attacks, spectacular murders, and mass rioting have made vivid the gulf that separates embittered and often radicalized Muslim minorities from the societies around them. Even in tiny, inoffensive Belgium, whose government was among the most vocal in opposing the war in Iraq and has bent over backward to respect the sensitivities of the Muslim community, the entire Brussels neighborhood of Molenbeek, according to the Flemish newspaper Het Volk, has been turned into a breeding ground for thousands of jihad candidates.

And yet even as these trends unfolded, and continue to unfold, a second and almost opposite set of trends can be perceived today. Contrary to Huntingtons forecast, much of world conflict is now overwhelmingly characterized by fighting and competition not between or among civilizations but within them. And nowhere is this truer than in the Muslim world.

-snip-

(Bret Stephens in Commentary, September 2008)
http://www.commentarymagazine.com/viewarticle.cfm/special-preview-br--how-to-manage-savagery-12507

Forum: The Rant

Obamas Friend, Americas Enemy

quidnunc — Thur, 28 Aug 2008 03:14:51 GMT

Have you ever been a friend or business associate of a terrorist? Not someone who, to your shock and horror, turned out secretly to have bombed government buildings. No, the question is whether youve ever befriended an unreconstructed radical whose past was well known to you when you entered his orbit and walked through doors he opened for you. Have you been chummy with an unapologetic terrorist who, years after youd known and worked closely with him, was still telling the New York Times he regretted only failing to carry out more attacks and that America still makes me want to puke?

Barack Obama has.

An organization called the American Issues Project, backed by Dallas investor Harold Simmons, is running a campaign ad which highlights Obamas troubling relationship with William Ayers. Ayers is a former member of the Weathermen terrorist organization that bombed the Pentagon, the U.S. Capitol, various police headquarters, and other targets in the early 1970s.

The Obama campaigns rejoinder is three-pronged: The first shot was an Obama response ad, which fails to offer any substantive explanation of why Obama maintains ties to Ayers. Obamas second move was to launch a heavy-handed effort to pressure television stations into rejecting the ad by promising financial retaliation against the stations and their advertisers which effort has apparently succeeded in intimidating Fox and CNN. The capper is a desperate call for the Justice Department to muzzle political speech through the prospect of a criminal investigation a demand that provides a disturbing sneak peak into what life would be like under an Obama Justice Department.

Needless to say, none of this is justified. If Obama has a good explanation for his ties to Ayers, he ought to give it. In the meantime, raising questions about that relationship is entirely legitimate.

Obamas campaign has acknowledged that the candidate and Ayers are friends. Though Obama has more recently minimized Ayers as just a guy who lives in my neighborhood, it is clear that the relationship was much deeper than that. Ayers and his fellow-terrorist wife, Bernadine Dohrn (who has spoken admiringly of the infamous Manson Family murders), are icons in Chicagos hard-left circles, to which Obama sought entre as a young community organizer. In 1995, they hosted a fundraiser that helped launch his career in Chicago politics.

Ayers has never abandoned his indictment of America as an imperialist hotbed of racism and economic exploitation. He has merely shifted methods from violent extortion to academic indoctrination. Through his perch as a professor of education at the University of Illinois, he has been a ceaseless critic of the criminal-justice system (he is essentially opposed to imprisoning even the most violent criminals) and a proponent of what he calls education reform but what is actually the use of the classroom to proselytize for the Lefts political agenda.

-snip-

(The National Review, August 27, 2008)
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=ZDI4YzUyYmI1ZjA1OWUzMDA5ZDIzNTI4NTk5ZmYwYWY=

Forum: News from the USA

Rethinking the War on Terror

quidnunc — Thur, 28 Aug 2008 02:25:52 GMT

Daniel Johnson: I thought wed start with Philips striking thesis in Terror and Consent that everything we thought we knew about terrorism and how to deal with it is obsolete and we must start again. Its a very radical view. Why do you think that?

Philip Bobbitt: Terrorism is the name of an epiphenomenon, a symptom of the state. Different constitutional cultures and orders produce different forms of terrorism. Perhaps the most vulnerability-making quality of our constitutional culture is our refusal to realise that it and the kind of terrorism it produces are undergoing a fundamental change. So we bring the habits of mind of a century of success against terrorism and they are just as inappropriate as those of the French knights who walked onward to Agincourt.

DJ: Michael, what do you think of that? Can the British claim to have learnt something with their long struggle with the IRA?

Michael Gove: Well, one of the things thats great about Philips thesis is that its direct and provocative and it forces us to reassess all the assumptions that we have. Theres one aspect of Philips analysis with which I completely agree. As states evolve, as technology changes, as states and their citizens change their attitudes towards each other, so terrorist organisations have evolved as well. Not just in reaction to how states act and how states enrage them, but because they too have become more technologically sophisticated. Philip very effectively points out that just as with the modern market state, the development of the traditional nation state is a decentralised, outsourced political structure. So al-Qaeda is a decentralised network organisation that outsources much of its activity. And in that respect I completely agree with Philips analysis and I think its provocative and useful.

The area where I think I depart, or would certainly place the emphasis slightly differently, is on the lessons that we can learn from history. Philips book is stuffed full of historical examples and all the more enjoyable a read for it. But I do think that one of the things we can crucially do is analyse the specific threat that we face from al-Qaeda and Islamist terrorism with reference to recent terrorist campaigns and also with reference to recent ideologies. I think that you can see Islamism as a sibling ideology to Fascism and Communism. Its another type of totalitarianism, there are as many similarities as there are differences. And I also think that we can learn from some of the mistakes that the West has made in dealing with recent terrorist atrocities as well as learning from some of the alleged successes.

PB: We may diverge a bit on this partly because my book is really not about al-Qaeda and the current threat. I perhaps tend to over-emphasise this fact because we are so mesmerised by al-Qaeda. Its a current and pointed threat, but if all jihadists became Presbyterians tomorrow, the kind of threat I describe would still exist. It would come from other quarters anti-globalisation terrorists, eco-terrorists, even from groups whose ideologies object to nothing of the present. I think that Michael is really presenting not so much an alternative view as an alternative overlay that is, hes addressing a slightly different problem to the one I address. Michael is one of the people who gets it. Ive felt this way from the very first time I met him and Im glad to see him prosper in his political career. Usually I have to be extremely tactful with politicians because theyre not really up to speed on this problem. Michael Gove is somebody who really is.

MG: Well, that is very flattering. Philips book and his broader analysis is an attempt to say, quite rightly, that even if the current threat were to disappear then there would be vulnerabilities in the way in which our states are organised. Thats not to say that some of the developments weve had over the past 30 or 40 years the way in which states have developed are bad. Its simply that youve got to be realistic, that with the move towards a certain type of society, more liberal, more open in lots of ways, so new vulnerabilities are exposed.

Philip runs through a sort of an analysis of how you minimise the risk to society and he makes some very powerful points about the need to align grand strategy with law, which forces those of us who are practising politicians to ask ourselves some pretty tough questions. And I, apart from having been a journalist who wrote every day about the now, am now a politician who has to deal with immediate problems. So in that respect I think I am in the position that lots of politicians, policymakers and journalists are in, allowing ourselves to focus on the immediate threat. Philip provides a necessary corrective to that by saying OK, thats understandable but lets look at the bigger issues that youre going to have to address because whatever happens in the specific campaign that al-Qaeda is waging at the moment, these structural vulnerabilities will remain.

But one of the things that I fear about the current sort of political conversation is that when it comes to dealing with the immediate threat, lots of people dont do their homework about Islamism and the ideology that animates Al-Qaeda. We could all form a judgment about what was required in order to make our societies more resilient and we might reach a consensus there but unless politicians are aware of what the ideological wellspring of these attacks is, unless they are aware of what the authentic root causes are and what the bogus root causes are then we are likely along the way to make mistakes that will only make our lives more difficult.

-snip-

(Philip Bobbitt and Michael Gove in Standpoint, September 2008)
http://www.standpointmag.co.uk/dialogue-september

Forum: The military forum

Britain Is Adrift in a 'Scary' World Without a Proper Foreign Policy

quidnunc — Thur, 28 Aug 2008 01:58:56 GMT

As the Government was on holiday for the Russian invasion of Georgia, the Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, has decided to leave nothing to chance when it comes to the Ukraine.

He flew to Kiev yesterday in an attempt to convince the Kremlin's potential next target that it had best keep calm. The Russians, said Miliband, have proved what was never in doubt that they could defeat the tiny Georgian army so, let's avoid provoking a rematch, this time with the Ukrainians playing the part of the plucky losers.

He promised that the West is serious about its commitments to a state whose historical misfortune, like Poland's, is proximity to the Russian bear. It is mildly cheering to see Miliband embarking on his voyage of discovery to the Ukraine in a bid to fill the large hole at the heart of HMG's existence.

What on earth is Britain's foreign policy? There is no sense that Number 10 or the Foreign and Commonwealth Office know what it should be; it might be exciting to hear what Miliband has in mind once he has worked out the details.

For now, his and our policy appears to involve pooling too much sovereignty and deferring to European Union diplomatic initiatives when the interests of the French or the Germans are not identical to ours.

Both have decided to lie down with the Russian bear, when experience has taught Britain that appeasing a bully only makes the eventual confrontation worse.

The weak EU handling of the Georgian crisis proves that, while we should forge alliances, the primary goal of British foreign policy should be defence of the national interest.

To his credit, in the Ukraine Miliband was trying to be muscular in a style that Labour foreign secretaries of the 1940s, 1960s and 1970s would recognise. His visit was well-timed and his message serious and properly considered.

Miliband has not had much luck with speeches since being given his posting when Gordon Brown became Prime Minister.

A woeful effort at last year's Labour conference sounded as though it had been drafted by schoolchildren: it involved him speaking very slowly and concluding with the warning that "the world is a scary place".

It might well be a scary place, but it is not made any less so by a Foreign Secretary struggling visibly to acclimatise to life in one of the great offices of state.

Since that conference, the world has become a good deal "scarier". But fortunately, Miliband has located new speech writers and spent some time thinking. The consequent contrast he provides with Gordon Brown should worry the PM's shrinking band of loyalists.

-snip-

(Iain Martin in The Telegraph, August 28, 2008)
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2008/08/28/do2801.xml

Forum: News from the UK: Britain and the world

Hillary Clinton Will Pledge Her Support and Call for Unity but Dont Believe a Word of It

quidnunc — Thur, 28 Aug 2008 00:45:55 GMT

Tonight on stage in Denver Hillary Clinton, one of the most accomplished practitioners of the fine art of political deception, will pull off the biggest stunt of her career so far.

In her speech to the Democratic convention Mrs Clinton will have warm words for Barack Obama. She will pledge herself to work for his election in November. She will urge her campaign supporters and the millions who voted for her in the primary to bury their differences and throw their support behind the nominee. She will, no doubt, describe herself as humbled.

Dont believe a word of it. There may be strenuous efforts to keep the tensions between the Clinton and Obama camps below the surface here in Denver, but they are as raw and powerful as they have ever been.

There has been loud grumbling among the Clinton team about the way that Mr Obama went about picking his vice-presidential nominee last weekend. They think that it was disrespectful of him not to have considered Mrs Clinton more seriously for the job. They are furious that he failed to consult Bill Clinton, the man who ran twice successfully for the presidency, for advice on the pick.

But most of all, many of them still have not come to terms with the arithmetical reality that they lost.

To be fair, it is not simply naked personal ambition that lies behind the rancour. The Clinton people have armfuls of polling evidence now that Mr Obama is failing to appeal to many of the voters that Mrs Clinton won in the primary campaign.

A CNN poll conducted at the weekend indicated that 27 per cent of Mrs Clintons supporters in the primary would vote not for Mr Obama in November but for John McCain, the Republican candidate. That figure is up from 16 per cent a month ago.

This number is causing alarm within the Obama camp. They know that it is almost impossible for him to win the presidency without those voters. That explains why the candidates team have swallowed their fears of turning the convention into a Clinton show and agreed to such a prominent role for the First Family of the Democratic Party.

Tonight, before she addresses the convention, Mrs Clinton will be the subject of a short biopic, a soft-focus documentary account of her many virtues the sort of thing reserved usually only for the presidential nominee or for some party grandee in ebbing years.

Tomorrow, the night that should be dominated by Joe Biden, the vicepresidential nominee, will surely be overshadowed by another barnstorming performance by Mr Clinton. Expect, by the way, the former President, unlike his wife, to be somewhat less than generous about Mr Obama. Aides say that he continues to smoulder more pungently about what he perceives to be the slights on him from the Obama campaign. He is miffed about the way he believes that Mr Obamas folk implicitly accused him of racism and he is really angry about the way the Democrat campaigned without paying much credit to the Clinton presidency.

-snip-

(Gerard Baker in The Times, August 26, 2008)
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article4608530.ece

Forum: News from the USA

The Spawn of Storm Rides Again

quidnunc — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 22:08:25 GMT

Are you one of those people who are getting several emails a day with "Journalists shot in Georgia" in the subject line, and with a Georgia.zip file attachment? If so, don't open that that zip file, because you are being probed by the Spawn of Storm. That's as in the Storm computer virus, zombie computers and botherders.

We covered the Storm virus (the first one to use this kind of news hook) last year with There are several recent variants, like email alerts the appear to come from MSNBC or BBC, many recent ones including a link to some Georgia or Olympics related item. The original Storm virus was so named because the news hook was unusually harsh Winter storms in Europe.

Despite all the publicity Storm got, and efforts to shut it down, the criminal gangs that seek to grab control of your PC found that the Storm formula continued to work if you just changed the news item. And so it came to pass that the spawn of Storm mutated and continues to infect more PCs (usually with a trojan horse program, that is used for things like DDOS attacks to shut down web sites in Georgia.)

The Storm computer virus had been spreading for nearly two years now, grabbing control of PCs around the world. Storm was believed to have infected millions of computers with a secret program that turned those PCs into unwilling slaves (or "zombies") of those controlling this network (or botnet) of computers. Many of you may remember spam directing you to look at an online greeting card, or accompanied by pdf files, or directing you to a site with pictures of a huge storm that hit Europe a year ago (thus the name). That was Storm. When you try to look at the PDF file, Storm secretly takes over your computer. But Storm tries very hard to hide itself. All it wants to do is use your Internet connection to send spam, or other types of malicious data.

What makes Storm the perfect Internet weapon is how it has been designed to survive. The Storm zombie does no damage to the PCs it infects, and simply sits there, waiting for an order. Those orders come via a peer-to-peer system (similar to things like Kazaa or Bittorrent). A small percentage of the zombies spend short periods of time trying to spread themselves, then turn off. This makes it more difficult to locate infected PCs. Commands from the Storm operators are sent through several layers of zombie PCs, again making it very difficult to identify where those commands come from. Moreover, Storm operates as a horde of clusters, each of two or three dozen zombie PCs. No existing methods can shut down Storm, although computer security organizations have been able to limit the spread. In fact, all that will work to kill Storm is to find the people running it, arrest them, and seize their access data. The programmers who put Storm together know their stuff, and police in dozens of country have cooperated to get their hands on them. The Storm owners were traced to Russia, but the government blocked efforts to shut down the hacker operation.

-snip-

(Unattributed in the Strategy Page, August 27, 2008)
http://www.strategypage.com/htmw/htiw/articles/20080827.aspx

Early on, it was believed that Storm was owned by a Russian criminal syndicate, but once more detailed proof was available, the Russian government refused to cooperate, treating Storm like some kind of secret military resources. And to the Russians, that's apparently what Storm is. Meanwhile, the investigation indicates that the Storm crew have some American members, and now the search is on for them, or any other non-Russians who worked on Storm, and are not inside Russia.

Forum: Radio, television, science and technology.

The Gratingest Generation

quidnunc — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 21:51:11 GMT

If our era could have its own coat of arms, it would be a yak against a background of mush. This must be the golden age of endless and pointless talk.

Every sports events seems to be preceded by all kinds of talk whether by athletes repeating cliches we have heard a thousand times, announcers making pseudo-profound sociological observations, or fans rambling on incoherently.

Then after the contest come the childish celebrations, the second-guessing and still more cliches.

Even during grand slam tennis matches, there are interviews with celebrities who happen to be in the stands, while the play on the court is ignored by both, even though it is shown on the screen. Theatrical hype on the part of both the interviewer and the celebrity are common. Does it ever occur to media chatterboxes that people watch tennis because they want to see tennis, not hear about some celebrity's latest movie or TV series?

If those who lived during World War II were "the greatest generation," this must be the gratingest generation. It's not just the constant meaningless chatter that grates. There is the incessant self-dramatization.

Everyone knows about Manny Ramirez's hair styling. But there have been many other sluggers over the years whose haircuts were never noticed. Does anyone remember Ted Williams' haircut or that of Mickey Mantle or Hank Aaron? Those people are remembered for what they did, not how they looked.

Boxers and wrestlers must be the worst. Outlandish get-ups and behaving like badly raised brats have become the norm.

When you see old films of Joe Louis or Rocky Marciano, you see adults acting like adults indeed, like gentlemen.

There was none of this making faces at an opponent before the fight or loudly boasting afterward, much less taunting during the contest. In other words, you didn't have to act like a lout to be a boxer.

When Joe DiMaggio hit a ball caught up against the 415-foot sign in Yankee Stadium by a Dodger outfielder, at a crucial point during the 1947 World Series, DiMaggio briefly kicked the dirt in frustration while running the bases.

That was as close to an emotional outburst that DiMaggio ever came. That picture has been shown innumerable times, precisely because it was so exceptional for DiMaggio to go even that far.

-snip-

(Thomas Sowell in The Washington Times, August 24, 2008)
http://www.washtimes.com/news/2008/aug/24/the-gratingest-generation/

Forum: Own goals!

Canadians Lead Hunt For Pirates

quidnunc — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 21:10:43 GMT

The clan fighting in Mogadishu continues, with neither side willing to give up trying to maintain control of the largest, and most lucrative, city in the country. The gunfire and random mortar shelling has not been good for business. But that has largely been the case for the last 18 years. No one has been able to work out a compromise deal, and with one faction influenced by Islamic radicals (who are on a Mission From God), compromise is even less likely.

The food situation in southern Somalia is getting worse, as is the security situation for foreign aid workers. While both the TNG and ICU realizes the need for foreign aid to keep their supporters alive, there are many "fringe groups" (as both the TNG and ICU describes them) who attack and plunder the foreign aid operations anyway. Many of these fringe guys are just bandits, out to score any way they can, and not caring about the consequences. But some of the ICU fringers buy into the al Qaeda belief that foreign aid, at least from infidel (non-Moslem) is a corrupting influence that must be eliminated. Nearly all the food and medical aid comes from Western nations, with most of the food supplied by the United States.

So far this year, at least 27 ships were attacked by pirates off the coast. The most active area has been the northern (Puntland) coast. There, several dozen piracy operations (and about a thousand gunmen) have established themselves in coastal villages. There are dozens of speed boats there, and some larger "mother ships" to take the speed boats and their crews far off shore. The hunting ground is the heavily trafficked Gulf of Aden (the entrance to the Red Sea, which leads to the Suez Canal). This stretch of water is 1,500 kilometers long and 480 wide. The pirates are armed with AK-47s, machine-guns, RPGs and satellite phones or walkie talkies. Ships avoid getting too close to the Somali coast, but the mother ships join the traffic moving in and out of the Red Sea, and launch their speed boats when they see a likely target (a Western owned ship, whose owners will pay the million dollars ransom.) There are now a network of ransom brokers in the Persian Gulf who, for a commission, will arrange for the payment of the ransom and the release of the crew. The warlord or clan leader who the pirates work for takes a large cut, as do Puntland officials (otherwise the Puntland police militias would have shut down the pirate bases in the coastal villages.) Currently, seven ships and 130 crew are being held in Puntland, while their ransom is being negotiated. But there are dozens of pirate groups up north, and only a few of them are going to strike it rich. But they all have guns, and a desire to make a lot of money fast.

The U.S. Central Command has established a Maritime Security Patrol Area in the Gulf of Aden, under the command of a Canadian Commodore. The UN authorized this two months ago. A squadron of warships (from several countries), plus maritime patrol aircraft, will begin watching the areas that have suffered the most pirate activity. Before the shipping companies began paying ransom (which governments and insurance companies warned them not to do), the pirates basically just robbed the ships (taking all that could be carried in their speed boats). Back then (a few years ago), the most frequent targets were the foreign fishing boats and ships that illegally operate in Somali coastal waters. Since there is no Somali coast guard to protect rich Somali fishing waters, the foreigners come in and take all they want. These ships are still attacked, but that rarely makes the news.

(Unattributed in the Strategy Page, August 27, 2008)
http://www.strategypage.com/qnd/somalia/articles/20080827.aspx

Forum: The military forum

A Brief History of Bush's Time: The current narrative of the Bush Presidency is that it is a failure. There is another narrative.

quidnunc — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 19:23:31 GMT

The current narrative of the Bush Presidency is that it is a failure (believed by 107 of 109 historians surveyed) and that George W. Bush is the worst President in history (believed by 61% of those surveyed historians). Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) said, "The president already has the mark of the American people he's the worst president we ever had."

That's one narrative. I have another.

Despite being handed one of the worst situations in history from President Clinton, and being fought tooth and nail by his opponents in government and the media, literally from the day of his election, President George W. Bush persevered to restore prosperity at home and to make the US and the world more free and secure.

The 2000 Election and Transition to Office

On November 7, 2000, voters went to the polls and elected George W. Bush to be President of the United States. After initially conceding defeat in a private phone call to Bush, Al Gore decided instead to contest the outcome in Florida. He sued for various recounts and was joined by the Florida Supreme Court, while Bush fought for counting votes per the rules in place prior to the election.

Complaints that Bush "stole" the election boiled down to two: (1) we should use a method of determining the winner other than the one in the Constitution, and (2) we should use a method of determining "voter intent" other than by counting legally cast ballots per the rules in place prior to the election.

Later recounts would show that George W. Bush would have won the election in Florida under any method considered by either Al Gore or the Florida Supreme Court.

"The Miami Herald and USA Today reported George W. Bush would have widened his 537-vote victory to a 1,665-vote margin if the recount ordered by the Florida Supreme Court would have been allowed to continue."

Al Gore would not concede in public until December 13, more than a month after the election. But the Clinton administration denied the Bush team the keys to the transition office set up two blocks from the White House and waiting since November 8, until December 15. Normally a newly-elected President is provided a transition office the day after the election. George W. Bush was finally allowed to use his just 36 days before being sworn in as President, or less than half the transition time allowed other Presidents-elect.

-snip-

(Randall Hoven in the American Thinker, August 27, 2008)
http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/08/a_brief_history_of_bushs_time.html

In short, all the new and major WMD proliferation threats were dealt with one way or another: Pakistan, North Korea, Iran, Iraq, Libya. They are not all put to rest, but about three-and-a-half of the five biggies appear to have been dealt with sufficiently. And terrorists, even those inside Iraq and Afghanistan at this point, seem to be kept at bay for now as well.

I think these are tremendous achievements, and ones that would not have occurred under either a President Gore or President Kerry.

But what have been the costs? In dollars, defense spending has gone from 3% of GDP to 4%. That's it a level that is still below where it was for over 50 years, from World War II through 1994.

In US lives, 4,147 servicemen lost their lives due to hostile or non-hostile action in Iraq to date. Each lost life is a tragedy, and I am deeply grateful to our lost troops and their families. From 2001 to 2006, the worst year for active military duty deaths was 2005, with 1,941 deaths due to all causes. In 1980, President Carter's last year, there were 2,392 such deaths. Each year in which we had troops engaged in both Iraq and Afghanistan saw fewer US military deaths than any year from 1980 through 1987, all years without major conflicts. The major conflicts of World War II, Korea and Vietnam had 405,399, 36,574, and 58,209 fatalities, respectively.

Forum: News from the USA

Online NewsHour: Roy Beck on Immigration to the United States

Basti — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 18:55:00 GMT

Online NewsHour: Roy Beck on Immigration to the United States

Note: This article is from 1996 and while that might seem to make it dated thats not the case. As the author of the article points out illegal immigration and over immigration are nothing new in the US, However at the present time employers seem even more inclined to thumb their noses at the law and hire illegals because they work cheaper and thus the profit margin is increased. Employers dont care what their actions may or may not do to the US as a whole in their pursuit of the all mighty dollar.
It is the opinion of this blogger that all employers who either knowingly or unknowingly hire illegals should be arrested and prosecuted under the RICO Act. (R.I.C.O. Act View as HTML) All the assets of said company should be confiscated and the company sold at auction.

The only way were going to get a handle on illegals is to make it more expensive and dangerous for employers to hire them. You cut off the demand and the supply will dry up.

In The Case Against Immigration, journalist Roy Beck argues that current immigration policies are damaging all segments of U.S. society (including recent immigrants), except the elite that benefits from an abundance of underpaid labor.

Since 1970, more than 30 million foreign citizens and their descendants have been added to the local communities and labor pools of the United States, Beck writes. Its the numerical equivalent of having relocated within our borders the entire present population of all Central American countries.

According to Beck, the results have been devastating: plentiful, cheap immigrant labor has distorted business decisions in a way that has slowed productivity growth, depressed wages, reduced worker benefits, and dramatically shifted hiring from native-born Americans to foreign workers in a number of both lower-paid and higher-paid occupations. African-Americans have suffered disproportionately in the current wave of mass immigration, which has knocked large numbers down the economic ladder as employers have chosen immigrants over African-American workers. The middle class has been eroded and middle-class opportunity has declined significantly. Crime and ethnic tensions have risen in areas of high immigration. Potentially irreversible damage has been done to the environment. And U.S. population growth has exploded at Third World rates.

The Case Against Immigration seeks to shatter many popular, romantic, myths that have confused recent debates. Beck offers a new interpretation of American history: that Americans never have approved of immigration or benefited from it except when the numbers were a fraction of the present level. And although the Great Wave of immigration in the late 19th and early 20th centuries is often cited as a positive example of why the country should be able to handle the current, even greater wave, Beck writes that the depressed wages, social unrest, and disintegrating cities that were the actual results of that mass immigration. Assimilation has been slow. It is taking nearly a century for the descendants of the Great Wave immigrants to catch up with the descendants of the native-born white Americans of that time. The rise of both groups into the middle class and the entry of black Americans into the economic mainstream could not begin until immigration rates were lowered in 1925.

As Roy Beck writes, The federal governments current immigration program primarily benefits a small minority of wealthy and powerful Americans at the expense of significant segments of the middle class and the poor. Attempts to protect the current level of immigration by wrapping it in the language of tradition or humanitarianism generally distort both history and the practical realities of our own era.

What precipitated the current crisis? Immigration rates skyrocketed far above traditional levels from the unintended consequences of reform legislation passed in 1965, and from relaxed rules for refugees from Communist countries during the Cold War. In addition, Beck says our immigration policy has abused the concept of temporary refuge.

According to The Case Against Immigration, arguments for sustaining todays historically high levels of immigration come mainly from a powerful group of conservative business interests and leaders of civil libertarian and religious groups. But Beck says their premises are wrong. He argues that technically trained workers are not in short supply in the U.S., and that high U.S. immigration fails to bring humanitarian relief to and often harms the sending countries of the Third World. He adds that immigrants do not fill jobs Americans wont do, but instead flood occupations, drive down working conditions and wages, and create workplace cultures that often bar native-born Americans from access to jobs.

Becks prescription is for Washington to base immigration policy on how many immigrants the nation actually needs. Officials should start the process at the zero level and add only the numbers that actually will help the majority of Americans. (p.244) According to his calculations, the United States should continue unlimited immigration for spouses and minor children of citizens, and to set a cap of 50,000 to cover all other admissions refugees, those seeking political asylum, persons with extraordinary skills, special-situation parents, and any other category that might arise.

That adds up to around 250,000 immigrants a year compared to around one million now. Only then, Beck says, can the U.S. achieve steady and significant economic progress for all Americans, especially the middle class.

SNIP

Forum: The Rant

Clinton Supporters Say Speech Didnt Heal

Basti — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 18:06:16 GMT

Clinton Supporters Say Speech Didnt Heal

How many ugly pantsuits is it possible to own?

Forum: News from the USA