FRANK J.’s communist connection, exposed. Ann Coulter was right — they’re everywhere!

UPDATE: And he’s well-armed, too! Sigs, by the way, are great, Frank.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Heck, I’m behind the curve. Frank’s communism is old news.

ANOTHER VICTORY FOR ANTI-IDIOTARIANISM:

MONTGOMERY, Ala. (AP) — The eight associate justices overruled Chief Justice Roy Moore on Thursday and directed that his Ten Commandments monument be removed from its public site in the Alabama Judicial Building.

The senior associate justice, Gorman Houston, said the eight instructed the building’s manager to “take all steps necessary to comply … as soon as practicable.” . . .

The associate justices wrote that they are “bound by solemn oath to follow the law, whether they agree or disagree with it.”

I expect to see Justice Moore wearing one of those “dissent is patriotic!” buttons, though.

UPDATE: Well, he is dissenting — and that, we’re told, is by definition patriotic, right? Alabama reader Bill Reece isn’t impressed, and it’s not just Moore that he’s upset with:

Idiotarianism. I like that. Justice Moore has managed to join a long line of elected officials who have publicly humiliated my home state of Alabama by populist poliltical pandering. Moore could care less about the Ten Commandments. He was considered to be, at best, an obscure and second rate trial judge until he first used the Ten Commandments in his courtroom to gain notoriety for himself. After pursuing the exact same “crusade” he has just completed, he leveraged the publicity he had received into support from the religious right in Alabama, allowing him to get elected Chief Justice over a far more qualified candidate who is presently a member of the Ala. Supreme Court.

Anyone familiar with the law on this issue, regardless of whether they agree with it, knows that this was a losing proposition. Moore knew it, but his crusade was “cheap” for him because the taxpayers of this impoverished State would bear the costs while he reaped the public notoriety. It was all about furthering his political ambitions.

The group that I am most disappointed in is the other members of the Alabama Supreme Court. Moore went behind their backs in erecting the monument in the middle of the night without prior notice or consent. None of them publicly, and to my knowledge privately, stood up to Moore at that time or at any other time during this farce and demanded that it end. It was only after the Federal Courts ordered removal and there was no room for Moore to manuever that the other Justices ordered its removal, when they had political cover to do so (i.e., blame it on the Feds). In doing so, they also allowed Moore to climb down off of the limb on to which he had stuck himself.

Now Moore gets a free pass for his wasteful and feckless behavior and the Alabama taxpayers have to pay the enormous legal fees and have to once again incur a hit to our reputations.

But with a patriotic dissenter as Chief Justice!

ANOTHER UPDATE: Another Alabama reader emails:

Let me add to Bill Reece’s comments about Roy Moore and say that he is an embarrassment to both Alabamians and Christians. (I’m a member of both those groups.) Instead of heeding Jesus’ call to go into your prayer closet, he’s built a 2.5-ton prayer closet on public property and wrapped himself in the pages of the Bible. How many people could have been fed, clothed, shown Christian love if time and money weren’t being wasted over this monument? Trust me when I say that many, many Alabama Christians are sickened by Moore’s conduct.

Well, show it at the polls. But admire him for his patriotic willingness to dissent!

STILL MORE: Peter Ingemi emails:

Although I agree with Judge Moore on the merits of the monument being a basis of law in Western Civ etc. I think that he and the protesters are making a big mistake.

In these post 9/11 days we have much to fear from groups of Americans willing to violate the law and court orders on the grounds that “God wants us to do it,” and I suspect that the next group that does this will have a response much less peaceful.

After all didn’t an Imam on a bus a few days ago decide to defy the Palestinian prime minister because God wanted him to?

Indeed. And what about the people who think God wants them to disobey the Alabama Supreme Court?

STILL MORE: Sam Heldman emails:

Your correspondent Bill Reece (an old friend of mine, unless there are two Bill Reece’s) criticizes all of the Associate Justices of the Alabama Supreme Court for not having publicly opposed Chief Justice Moore before now. But in fact one did: Justice Johnstone, the only Democrat on the Court. Soon after Chief Justice Moore installed the monument, about two years ago, Justice Johnstone publicly criticized it in quite strong terms, warning of the dangers of theocracy. See, e.g., this article quoting Justice Johnstone’s public statement.

So noted. Here’s a quote from the linked item:

“Courts should confine themselves to deciding their cases according to established law,” Johnstone said. “I shun symbolic controversies because I think time and effort are better spent in tangible service rather than symbolic gesture. However, while I believe in God, I oppose the movement to govern in the name of God. People who govern in the name of God attribute their own personal preferences to God and therefore recognize no limits in imposing those preferences on other people.”

Symbolic issues are usually employed as a way of distracting voters from noticing what a bad job politicians are doing at their actual work. What’s Moore doing these days?

“SORORITY EYE” FOR THE STRAIGHT GUY? Actually, I think that show would sell.

OXBLOG HAS A QUOTE from the just-captured “Chemical Ali” (via Human Rights Watch) that’s worth repeating:

I will kill them all with chemical weapons! Who is going to say anything? The international community? F_ck them! the international community, and those who listen to them!… I will not attack them with chemicals just one day, but I will continue to attack them with chemicals for fifteen days.

With this quote, and with the nickname “Chemical Ali,” I’d hate to be his defense lawyer. Er, if he ever gets one; I’m not quite sure what his status is. Will he be turned over to the Iraqis eventually?

There’s lots of good stuff at Oxblog today — just scroll up and down from this post.

UPDATE: Oops! I’m not up to date: “Ali Hassan al-Majid is now officially known as ‘Conventional Ali,’ since it is common knowledge that Iraq had no chemical weapons program.”

Heh.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Here’s more on chemical weapons:

As a former Romanian spy chief who used to take orders from the Soviet KGB, it is perfectly obvious to me that Russia is behind the evanescence of Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction. After all, Russia helped Saddam get his hands on them in the first place. The Soviet Union and all its bloc states always had a standard operating procedure for deep sixing weapons of mass destruction — in Romanian it was codenamed “Sarindar, meaning “emergency exit.”Iimplemented it in Libya. It was for ridding Third World despots of all trace of their chemical weapons if the Western imperialists ever got near them. We wanted to make sure they would never be traced back to us, and we also wanted to frustrate the West by not giving them anything they could make propaganda with.

All chemical weapons were to be immediately burned or buried deep at sea. Technological documentation, however, would be preserved in microfiche buried in waterproof containers for future reconstruction.

“Buried deep at sea.” That might explain those missing “mystery ships” from before the war. (Via Junkyard Blog).

HERE’S A RARE SCREENSHOT of Frank J.’s recent TV appearance.

IT JUST GETS WORSE FOR THE BBC:

David Kelly told a Sunday Times journalist that Andrew Gilligan’s report on the Today programme was “bullshit” and said he had been “put through the wringer” by the Ministry of Defence over the affair. . . .

Rufford told the inquiry it was not unusual for him to visit Dr Kelly at his home, but admitted part of his reason for visiting the government scientist on that day had been to ask him about the row between the government and the BBC over the September dossier on Iraq’s weapons.

He said that in their conversation Dr Kelly described the dossier as “factual and credible”.

Hmm. That’s not the impression the BBC gave.

UPDATE: A reader from Britain emails that the Beeb’s broadcasts don’t seem to have gotten around to mentioning this item. Imagine!

KOFI ANNAN SAYS that the the United Nations is too feckless and irresponsible to be trusted with its own security. Well, yes, that’s basically what he says in response to people pointing out that the U.N. mission in Baghdad rejected U.S. offers of more security, and refused to take recommended precautions:

Annan rejected, however, Washington’s reasoning that UN officials in Baghdad had refused offers by U.S. forces in Iraq to protect the compound.

“Nobody (asks) you if you want the police to patrol your neighbourhood,” he said as he returned to UN headquarters after cutting short his holiday in Europe. “They make the assessment that patrol and protection is needed, and then they start, and that’s what should be done in Iraq.”

Read down a bit further and you see this:

“Security around our location was not as secure as you might find at the U.S. compound, and that was a decision we made so the offices were available to the people,” said chief UN spokesman Fred Eckhard, in comments that appeared to confirm the UN had refused U.S. help. “We did not think at the time we were taking an unnecessary risk.”

So the problem is that we let the U.N. make up its own mind. Fiendish? No. Ill-advised? — Well, here Annan might actually have a point. I agree with Kofi — the United States shouldn’t listen to the U.N. on matters of security, but should do what’s necessary even if the U.N. objects. So what, exactly is Kofi Annan being paid to do? Make lame criticisms of the United States, apparently. At that, he seems diligent and indefatigable. (Emphasis added above).

UPDATE: A couple of readers suggest that Annan’s comments here are a variation on the line from Animal House: “You f*cked up — you trusted us!”

Kofi as Otter? Well it’s better than Kaus as Coulter. . . .

MICKEY KAUS:

Makes the BBC look like the O’Reilly Factor! I try to resist charging that skeptical reports about the war reflect impatient, biased “quagmirism.” (I was a quagmirist on Vietnam and haven’t changed my mind about that.) But today’s CBS News “Reality Check” by Mark Phillips (available as the “Post-War Reality Check” on this page) was so jaw-droppingly one-sided and opportunistically defeatist it’s turning me into Ann Coulter!

Turning Kaus into Ann Coulter? Sorry but it’s too early in the morning for the mental image of Kaus in a miniskirt. In fact, it’s always too early in the morning for that image.

As for the report (moved off the main page, it’s now here), I watched it and it’s as bad as Kaus says — almost a Kent Brockman parody of biased TV news, with statements by obvious Al Qaeda sympathizers (one of whom called the 9/11 hijackers the “magnificent 19”) that the U.S. approach is failing taken uncritically at face value because they go where Phillips wants to go. (What were they going to say: “Yes, the U.S. is succeeding, and we’re failing”?).

CBS News is clearly in a quagmire. I think they need more — and better — troops!

QUAGMIRE UPDATE: “Chemical Ali” has been captured.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Kurt Dykstra emails:

I saw this at about 3 a.m. this morning while groggily hauling myself to bed. I thought I was having a bad dream when I saw and heard the “Reality Check.” Of course, that segment was preceded by another segment from a younger, alpha male-type reporter whose name I can’t recall, casually dressed for the desert heat, who breathlessly said, essentially, “Of course the US needs the UN now more than ever.” Of course! No quotes or video clips to buttress the comment or attribute it to someone else. Um, fella, how about you try reporting something instead of attempting the role of the stealth pundit.

In general, the entirety of the CBS segments on Iraq should have been framed on screen with the catchy title: “It’s 1968 All Over Again.” Not that I expect the news media to rah-rah the war, but I apparently expect too much from CBS to hope for dispassionate, even-handed, in-depth coverage of a lengthy and complex affair.

Glad to see the CBS farce has been noticed by others as well.

Yep. And though the piece suggests that U.S. strategy is simplistic, I have to wonder how anything could be more simplistic than viewing every conflict through the prism of an almost 40-year-old war.

[Aren’t you going to make the Baby Boomers feel kind of, well, old if you point out that the Vietnam war is nearly as old as you are? — Ed. Gee, do you think that’s why they don’t want to admit it?]

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: A reader chides me for the above snarky faux-editorial colloquy. But, really, the Vietnam War was several wars ago. Heck, there are even Vietnam War reenactors, which should tell you all you need to know about how up-to-date a model it is. (Link via Miss Kickadee).

IT’S WORKING:

The Syrian Ba’athist regime is struggling to prevent a rising tide of agitation for across-the-board reform and democratisation from turning into a flood.

For one of the last fraying Arab versions of the theoretically socialist, one-party state, repression is proving less and less effective. . . .

Addomari was in the thick of it, but Farzat simply went too far. He continued to attack a perennial target of his, Saddam Hussein, even as Americans and British prepared to invade his country.

He portrayed Saddam and his portly generals stuffing the Iraqi people, as cannon fodder, into the barrel of a gun, and haranguing a crowd of hungry and ragged citizens: “They have come to plunder your palaces, your riches, your businesses and your oil.”

The Ba’athists weren’t happy.

APPARENTLY, IF YOUR S.A.T. SCORES ARE GOOD ENOUGH, you’re entitled to go to college even if you flunk a bunch of classes in your senior year. At least, that’s the theory behind a lawsuit in North Carolina that probably shouldn’t have been filed. Begging to Differ is channeling Sam Kinison in response.

UPDATE: Kimberly Swygert has much more on this.

JOHN LOTT has posted a lengthy response to the Ayres and Donohue letter I mention below, on his website. “Despite their continuing claims to the press, Ayres and Donohue’s own papers do NOT provide any statistically significant evidence that violent crimes increase. . . . Ayres and Donohue’s tone is extreme, especially in comparison to my language.”

UPDATE: Read this, too. Lott emails:

Given Ayres and Donohue’s claim that “”correcting his errors did eliminate his finding,” one can readily see from the corrected tables and figures that this statement is false. The coefficient estimates do change somewhat, but the basic point is still clear. Whether one uses the types of statistical tests that Ayres and Donohue use for all their regressions or whether you use the the type of methodology that Plassmann argues for because of the truncation issues and the nature of the data being count data, you still get a drop in crime.

I expect that there will be more discussion on this topic.

HERE’S AN INTERESTING PROFILE of recently captured Jemaah Islamiyyah terrorist Hanbali, featuring literally dozens of links.

DEREK LOWE HAS A NANOTECHNOLOGY ROUNDUP POST that’s a must-read if you’re interested in this stuff, though it’s mostly bio-nanotech.

He also has a post about a drug that makes people have orgasms when they yawn. I love the potential implications of this — suddenly the most boring professors would become the most popular. C-SPAN would have a 30 share. Tax lawyers would be sought out at cocktail parties. . . .

YEP, THIS EMAIL VIRUS OUTBREAK IS THE WORST EVER:

Sobig.F, which is the sixth and latest strain of a virus that first emerged in January, spreads through Windows personal computers via e-mail and network file- share systems. Besides clogging e-mail systems full of messages with subjects like “Re: Details” and “Re: Wicked screensaver,” the virus also deposits a Trojan horse, or hacker back door, that can be used to turn victims’ PCs into spam machines.

“It’s a seeding,” said Mr. Czarny. “All they’re looking to do is plant that Trojan.”

Sobig.F can overwhelm e-mail servers, and deleting all those messages can consume users’ time, said Mr. Ellis. “I think Nachi’s really going to be the one that hurts us from the volume perspective — us being the Internet.”

I can’t believe how many virus emails are hitting my system. They’re getting blocked at the server, but hundreds of 100K attachments per hour is a lot of traffic, and if this spreads it’ll really bog down the Net.

MORE ARIANNA HYPOCRISY, once again unearthed by her nemesis, Matt Welch.

NOW THAT’S PUNDITRY:

At least one pundit is saying that this is a match between a Clinton surrogate (Davis) and a Reagan imitator (Schwarzenegger). But Davis is an inferior Clinton while Schwarzenegger may actually be a superior Reagan.

He shoots, he scores.

WELL, THE ANSWER IS YES, at least sometimes.

MICHELLE MALKIN:

While Katie Couric complains about GOP candidate Arnold Schwarzenegger being “the son of a Nazi party member” and international media outlets assail Schwarzenegger adviser Pete Wilson as “anti-immigrant” and “racially divisive,” the liberal press has been stone-cold silent on Bustamante’s connection to one of the nation’s most virulently racist organizations. . . .

MEChA has been dismissed by some as a harmless social club, but it operates an identity politics indoctrination machine on publicly subsidized college and high school campuses nationwide that would make David Duke and the KKK turn green with envy. MEChA members in the University of California system have rioted in Los Angeles, editorialized that federal immigration “pigs should be killed, every single one” in San Diego, and are suspected of breaking into a conservative student publication’s offices and stealing its entire print run in Berkeley.

MEChA’s symbol is an eagle clutching a dynamite stick and machete-like weapon in its claws; its motto is ” Por La Raza todo. Fuera de La Raza nada (For the Race, everything. For those outside the Race, nothing).” . . .

Why should Bustamante, a public figure already known to have used a racial epithet in the past (he infamously used the word “nigger” while addressing a Black History Month event two years ago) get a pass?

I guess I should be surprised that this story has gotten so little attention, but I’m not.

UPDATE: Here’s a DeWayne Wickham piece on Bustamante’s use of the n-word. Bustamante apologized, but it’s what slipped out. One can only imagine how people would respond if Bush — or Schwarzenegger — made a similar slip. And it doesn’t explain MECha.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Pedro Cardenas emails:

I attended Cal-Berkeley and although MeCHA’s politics are backward, as a group it’s rather harmless. It’s all bark, no bite. Just clueless college kids playing revolutionary and for what it’s worth, you get that a lot at Cal from many groups. (At a high school level, they weren’t that much better. I attended Garfield High in East Los Angeles and didn’t know of its existence until after graduation. I’m sure most people were surprised as well).

Not surprising — but the point is the group’s racism, not its effectiveness. Most white-supremacist groups are equally ineffectual, but a major-party candidate’s membership in one would get a lot more attention than this has gotten. That’s a double standard.

JACOB T. LEVY WRITES IN THE NEW REPUBLIC:

Agricultural protectionism–the combination of quotas, tariffs, and subsidies for farm products–may be the purest example of destructive special-interest politics ever created. . . .

Still, the costs agricultural policies impose on their own societies are manageable in the huge economies of the developed world. The costs they impose on the rest of the world are often devastating.

Yes. This is why they should be abolished. As the Nebraska Guitar Militia sing:

They’re just payin’ us to live here
Payin us not to go
Bribin’ us to take the place of
Sioux and Buffalo

Or, as elsewhere in the song, “Other folks get welfare, but we get ‘aid’ — don’t care what you call it man, long as I get paid.”

MICHAEL FUMENTO IS CHANNELING BILL O’REILLY in a way that doesn’t become him. Fumento’s schtick — which is sometimes on target and sometimes not, though I’ve generally admired his work — is that he overcomes elitism and political correctness by having the arguments and the facts. Yet he responded to criticism from blogger Rich Hailey with insulting but largely fact-free emails, and now he’s following it up with more insults in place of argument on his own website. (The Atkins diet doesn’t work because Rich Hailey’s picture looks fat? Yeah, that’s a winner. And if blogs and bloggers are as insignificant as he says, then why is he so angry?)

Hailey’s picture may be unflattering, but this style of argument doesn’t make Fumento look good, though I suppose it does prove him right when he says that anyone with a website can go ahead and post just anything. An editor would have restrained this embarrassing outburst. And, based on this churlish post, Fumento needs one. Perhaps he should leave web-punditry to those who are capable of restraining themselves.

UPDATE: According to a couple of readers Fumento also appears to be guilty of photo-dowdification. If you’ll compare the photo on Hailey’s page with the one on Fumento’s page, you’ll see that Fumento has squashed the rectangular photo into a square, having the effect of making Hailey look rather more portly than in the original.

I’m not sure that this is intentional — the “fat” image shows properties of 169 x 169 pixels, while the original image shows 200 x 250, and there hasn’t been any cropping. But when I saved the “fat” image to put up here for a comparison, it popped back to the original dimensions, suggesting that some sort of weird formatting thing on Fumento’s page is responsible.

ANOTHER UPDATE: I looked at the source HTML for the page, and both height and width of the image are set at 169, which has the effect of forcing the original image into the less flattering square when it’s displayed on a browser.

Intentional, or accidental? Beats me, though it’s probably the latter — the “typing monkey” image on the page has the same formatting. I think it’s just sloppy coding. Note to Fumento: if you specify only a height or width dimension, the image will automatically be displayed at the size you specify, with the other dimension automatically adjusted to keep things in proper proportion. If you specify both height and width, then if the proportions are different from the original image you’ll distort it.

Hey, maybe this web stuff isn’t quite as easy as it looks. . . .

UPDATE: John Hawkins has some numbers.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Bigwig has some advice for Fumento, who he says is trolling:

If Mr. Fumento really is that popular, proving it is easy. All he has to do is put a publicly accessible web counter on his front page.

I’ll just note that I have an open counter.

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: Fumento has responded to this post, and quite politely. But I don’t have an opinion on the Atkins diet; I just thought he was being rude. Everybody I know who has tried Atkins has lost weight. Nearly all of them have gained it back. But, of course, that’s true of every other diet. . . .

BILL HERBERT CRITIQUES a post by Kevin Drum that itself criticizes Josh Chafetz’s Weekly Standard cover story on BBC bias.

It’s a never-ending conversation here in the blogosphere!

HERE’S AN INTERESTING THEORY on the motivation behind the U.N. bombing in Baghdad. I think it’s quite plausible.

BILL WHITTLE HAS A NEW ESSAY: It’s on responsibility.

DANIEL DREZNER HAS MORE ON NORTH KOREA, where there’s a lot of interesting multilateral diplomacy going on.

CHIEF WIGGLES WAS ON THE SCENE OF THE U.N. BOMBING in Baghdad, and blogs a firsthand report. He’s also unhappy with the media coverage:

Maybe our efforts for the most part are going unnoticed: the schools and hospitals that have been opened, the playgrounds and housing projects that have been started, and the many jobs that have been created. Where is all the talk about the thousands of good things that have been done? Why is the media not assisting to promote the word that many great things are occurring day after day? Where is the truth in reporting that makes good news as sellable as bad news? . . .

I am fine, if any of you are wondering. Life goes on as usual, these acts of terrorism hardly causing us to skip a beat in the process of reconstruction. Our resolve is firm and commitment in tack, for we will succeed and be victorious.

This is the right thing to be doing; righteousness will prevail over the evil intentions of misguided hate filled people. Keep the faith. Do your part in assisting us to be able to continue until we are finished with our plans. We need your help. Tell everyone you know that we will not give in to their negative reporting and we will not give up until we are done.

Read the whole thing.