Archive for 2006
August 24, 2006
MICHAEL YOUNG: Hezbollah lost.
A LOOK AT Chinese lawyers and human rights.
A LOOK AT the political value of blog advertising, at National Journal’s “Beltway Blogroll.”
IN Tehran in June, several thousand people held a peaceful demonstration calling for legal changes that would give a woman’s testimony in court equal value to a man’s. The demonstrators, most of them women, were attacked with tear gas and beaten with batons by men and women from Iran’s State Security Forces, according to Amnesty International.
Iranian women may not travel without their husband’s permission but they are allowed to wield a truncheon against other women.Do you think women in Western countries marched in solidarity with the Iranian women demonstrators? Of course not. Do you think there are posters and graffiti at universities condemning the Iranian President? Of course not. You know, without needing to go there, that any graffiti at universities will be condemning George W. Bush, not Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. (I concede Bush is easier to spell.)
You know, before you get there, that at the Melbourne Writers Festival starting this weekend the principal hate figures are going to be Bush and John Howard. You know there will be many sympathetic references to David Hicks but probably none to Ashraf Kolhari, an Iranian mother of four who has been in jail for five years for allegedly having sex outside marriage and, until last week, who was under sentence of death by stoning.
Thank goddess, as they used to say: a few Western feminists have begun to wonder why women who once marched for women’s rights are marching alongside people who would take away even the most basic of those rights.
Read the whole thing.
SOME INTERESTING CONGRESSIONAL / LOBBYIST DIGGING at the Sunlight Foundation.
FAUXTOGRAPHY UPDATE: Brit Hume reported on the phony ambulance incident — video is at Hot Air.
UPDATE: More on stupid journalist tricks.
MORE TERROR CHARGES IN EUROPE:
A Danish prosecutor today charged four young Muslims with plotting a terror attack in Europe.
The four suspects were arrested in October last year in connection with an investigation in Bosnia.
Prosecutor Henning Fode said they helped two other suspects in Bosnia get hold of weapons and explosives as part of a plot to blow up an unidentified European target.
The four men, who cannot be named under a court order, would face up to life in prison if found guilty. Under Danish law, life sentences are commuted after 16 years.
Well, that should certainly frighten any potential imitators.
FIRST DELL, NOW APPLE: “Computer giant Apple is recalling 1.8m batteries used in its laptop computers worldwide after overheating complaints.”
CUT THE CARDS: Interviewing Dave Ramsey, at Hot Air.
A LOOK AT THE ANTI-CHAVEZ OPPOSITION IN VENEZUELA, which is reportedly growing.
DANIEL GLOVER says we’re seeing “the buying of the Democratic blogosphere.”
BILL ROGGIO: “Somalia continues the slide into the darkness of a radical Islamist state.”
MEGAN MCARDLE: “Where does this idea come from that the Japanese and German corporations don’t have to pay any costs to cover their employees’ health and retirement? And why hasn’t anyone bothered to check it?”
IRAQPUNDIT HAS MORE on the security situation in Baghdad.
ALL YOUR FAKES ARE BELONG TO US.
BRUCE SCHNEIER WRITES ON WHAT THE TERRORISTS WANT: He’s right that we don’t want to overreact, and that some of the aviation scares seem like overreactions. It’s like an immune system: Overreact and you get allergies and autoimmune problems; underreact and you die of overwheming sepsis or something. But getting the balance right is harder than saying that we need to get the balance right.
But we need to beware of what one of Schneier’s commenters notes: “What’s to stop terriorists now just getting on flights and acting suspiciously on purpose. If no crime was committed (I was just checking my watch, saying my prayers, going to the bathroom etc.) they can cause disruption, create paranoia and terror at will and get off scott free.” That’s what I would do if I were a terrorist.
Schneier’s blog, by the way, is a must-read on this stuff, and I recommend it, as I have in the past.
A BIG MAZDA RX-8 RECALL: Mine’s given me no problems, but it sounds as if Mazda is handling this the right way. More here.
IN THE MAIL: Richard Posner’s new book, Not a Suicide Pact: The Constitution in a Time of National Emergency.
PORKBUSTERS UPDATE: The “secret hold” story is getting more attention:
In an ironic twist, legislation that would open up the murky world of government contracting to public scrutiny has been derailed by a secret parliamentary maneuver.
An unidentified senator placed a “secret hold” on legislation introduced by Sens. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., and Barack Obama, D-Ill., that would create a searchable database of government contracts, grants, insurance, loans and financial assistance, worth $2.5 trillion last year. The database would bring transparency to federal spending and be as simple to use as conducting a Google search.
The measure had been unanimously passed in a voice vote last month by the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. It was on the fast track for floor action before Congress recessed Aug. 4 when someone put a hold on the measure.
Now the bill is in political limbo. Under Senate rules, unless the senator who placed the hold decides to lift it, the bill will not be brought up for a vote.
More and more people are trying to smoke out the “secret holder” though.
ANN ALTHOUSE: “Why do judges make it easier for their critics?” Because they live in a cocoon.
MCCAIN IS BASHING BUSH ON IRAQ, and some people are pretty angry at him for backstabbing.
The substance of McCain’s claim is pretty weak: I don’t recall Bush ever saying that Iraq would be a “day at the beach,” and in fact casualties to date are considerably lower than what was generally expected for the ground war to Baghdad, where you generally heard figures in the 10,000 range. (Ted Kennedy predicted that we’d run through battalions a day. Gary Hart predicted worse.) It’s more the duration, and the extent of the bad press, that has exceeded expectations, really, though McCain’s pretty sensitive to bad press.
But this isn’t a “backstab.” In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if it were choreographed by Karl Rove. Democrats forget it, but Bush doesn’t matter much from the perspective of 2008, and if the GOP can get mileage out of Bush-bashing, it will.
Retrospective Reagan hagiography has obscured this, but in the last couple of years of the Reagan Administration we saw the same thing. Reagan was expendable, since he couldn’t be reelected, and with the country tired of the same guy, Republicans (politicians and pundits alike) distanced themselves in order to position for 1988. Bush Sr. ran in 1988, in fact, on an “I’m not like Reagan, but I’ll still protect the country unlike those weakling Democrats” platform. Whoever is the GOP nominee in 2008 will do the same, and will be able to do it more obviously because — unlike George H.W. Bush — they won’t be a sitting Vice President.
To the GOP, Bush is a wasting asset; like Reagan at the same part of his term, he’s expendable. They’ll use him up, and if the best way to get value out of him over the next couple of years is to bash him, then they will. That’s just politics, and McCain’s just ahead of the curve. Being ahead of the curve may not be smart, since McCain’s biggest weak point is with the Bush base, but I think it’s the strategy.
UPDATE: Jim Geraghty has a different reason for being unhappy with McCain.
And McCain sure sounded different in 2003. So did a lot of Democrats who are now criticizing the war, of course, but I don’t know if McCain can pull this off.
ANOTHER UPDATE: It’s looking like McCain won’t be able to pull this off.
MORE: By the way, here’s a roundup of lefty predictions about the war that illustrate that many antiwar people were hoping expecting that things would turn out much, much worse than they did. McCain, however, was not endorsing their views at the time.
More on McCain here.
DEFENSETECH: “Let’s face it: nobody cares about mine warfare. . . . But all that’s about to change.”
UPDATE: Speaking of mines. (Thanks to reader Richard Andrews for the tip.)
CANADIAN DOCTORS are weighing in in favor of private health care.
Maybe they’ve seen Dead Meat. Or, more accurately I suppose, they’ve lived it.
TEA DOESN’T DEHYDRATE YOU: “Tea not only rehydrates as well as water does, but it can also protect against heart disease and some cancers, UK nutritionists found.”