IGNORE BLOGGERS AT YOUR PERIL: That’s the latest research! (Via Dan Riehl).
Archive for 2006
April 18, 2006
THE COUNTERTERRORISM BLOG IS MERGING WITH BILL ROGGIO’S — and Roggio is heading to Afghanistan as an embedded blogger.
MICHAEL YON’S FRONTLINE FORUM is “a place for those deployed in harm’s way to tell real stories about the ground situation.”
I’M ALL FOR ROBUST DEBATE, but calling a Democratic career civil servant a child molester just to score political points seems beyond the pale.
SAMI AL-ARIAN PLEADS GUILTY:
When Sami Al-Arian denied raising funds for the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, he now says he was lying.
The former University of South Florida professor has portrayed himself as a martyr to free speech, a victim of anti-Muslim sentiment and the nation’s war on terrorism. He maintained he supported only peaceful solutions to the problems in the Middle East.
But in court papers unsealed Monday, Al-Arian admitted he raised money for the Islamic Jihad and conspired to hide the identities of other members of the terrorist organization, including his brother-in-law, Mazen Al-Najjar. He also admitted knowing “that the PIJ achieved its objectives by, among other means, acts of violence.”
Read the whole thing.
PORKBUSTERS UPDATE: Trent Lott isn’t giving up:
Mississippi’s two U.S. senators included $700 million in an emergency war spending bill to relocate a Gulf Coast rail line that has already been rebuilt after Hurricane Katrina at a cost of at least $250 million.
Republican Sens. Trent Lott and Thad Cochran, who have the backing of their state’s economic development agencies and tourism industry, say the CSX freight line must be moved to save it from the next hurricane and to protect Mississippi’s growing coastal population from rail accidents. But critics of the measure call it a gift to coastal developers and the casino industry that would be paid for with money carved out of tight Katrina relief funds and piggybacked onto funding for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
“It is ludicrous for the Senate to spend $700 million to destroy and relocate a rail line that is in perfect working order, particularly when it recently underwent a $250 million repair,” said Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), who is planning to challenge the funding when the $106.5 billion war spending bill reaches the Senate floor. “American taxpayers are generous and are happy to restore damaged property, but it is wrong for senators to turn this tragedy into a giveaway for economic developers.”
You can find a defense of Lott’s plan — which I don’t find terribly convincing, but your results may vary — here.
IN THE MAIL: Andrew Napolitano’s new book, The Constitution in Exile : How the Federal Government Has Seized Power by Rewriting the Supreme Law of the Land.
The good news — as this piece on responses to the Kelo case demonstrates — is that liberty lost isn’t gone forever, if people care. Just think how much could have been accomplished, though, if the GOP Congress had actually cared about limiting government.
DON’T MISS THIS SATURDAY’S Milbloggers Conference in Washington, D.C.
BAD NEWS FOR THE G.O.P.: Republican voters are coming to appreciate the virtues of divided government.
BILL HOBBS UPDATE: The blowback continues — see the comments to this post by Michael Silence of the Knoxville News-Sentinel.
But in a comment to this post Hobbs observes:
I think we should all just let it go and move on. I’m going to be fine. I already had plenty of consulting work, and more is coming in. This incident hasn’t hurt me.
Belmont was a great place to work, I did some amazing work there that will make the resume look great, and the university was gracious at the end. . . .
If I had been a PR advisor telling Belmont what to do in this situation, rather than the employee involved, I would have told them to part ways with the employee.
I also would have told them that doing so would likely spark severe blowback in the blogosphere.
As it did.
UPDATE: To Belmont University’s undoubted delight, the story has made Inside Higher Education:
To date, several American colleges — among them Century College of Minnesota, New York University and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign — have found themselves caught up in controversies over the Danish cartoons and how to respond to them, but no one besides Hobbs has lost a job.
Hobbs announced his resignation from Belmont in a posting on another blog in which he said that his departure was a “mutual” decision and praised the university. But many commenters there and elsewhere criticized the university for not sticking up for Hobbs. His departure from Belmont is being called McCarthyite, “a travesty of justice,” and evidence that “the barbarians are truly at the gate.” (Few of the comments have noted that Hobbs worked in public relations at Belmont.)
Via e-mail, Hobbs declined to comment, but said that this online account — which questioned how his removal was consistent with Belmont’s values — was accurate.
Jason Rogers, vice president for administration and university counsel at Belmont, said that it was university policy not to discuss personnel matters and that he could say little more than that Hobbs was no longer employed there.
Asked about criticism that the university’s handling of the situation conflicted with free expression, Rogers said: “The university is committed to freedom of expression. This particular situation isn’t about freedom of expression. It’s about a personnel matter.”
Uh huh.
MORE: Bill Quick: “How stupid can you get? They need a good PR guy in the worst way. Oh, wait a minute. They fired him.”
MICKEY KAUS TRIES TO EXPLAIN why I should care about the Burkle affair. (Video here).
EUGENE VOLOKH has the latest in the Ohio State University harassment debacle. The University has done the right thing; if I were the librarian, however, I’d consider suing the faculty members who made the obviously-ridiculous complaint. Furthermore, if I were their colleagues I’d be rather unhappy with them for embarrassing the entire University with a silly (and thuggish) stunt.
Did the American Library Association ever get involved, defending the ability of librarians to make recommendations without fear of intimidation? Just wondering.
UPDATE: Apparently not. Librarian-reader Maureen Lynch emails:
I’m a Librarian & a former member of the American Library Association. Stress FORMER. Sadly, they are an extremely political organization (guess which way they lean?) who rarely, if ever, side with Librarians who are perceived as conservative. This is an organization that has had Molly Ivins speak as a keynote speaker, which should tell you something about their leanings. Considering the ALA has a large Gay specialty group , there’s no way they would take his side. I used to attend their annual meetings until I got tired of their perennial Republican- & business-bashing & long ago dropped my membership. Because so many of us who are corporate Librarians & tired of ALA’s nonsense have left the organization, it is dominated by hate-filled lefties with an agenda.
The politicization of professional associations over the past few decades has done real harm. Sounds like this is another example.
ARMY OF DAVIDS UPDATE: It’s a podcast review of the book from Newt Gingrich. He and Joe Trippi agree on something! Actually, I suspect they agree on quite a few things.
MILBLOGWIRE will bring the best from military bloggers around the world.
To hear two and three star generals whine that Rumsfeld is too intimidating causes one to ask who else can so easily intimidate them? Are we talking perhaps of the insurgents, Ahmadinejad, Assad Fils, the North Korean or China? Imagine being a soldier who has served under the command of so easily intimidated a general. Their retired generals’ contention that they are speaking for their active duty colleagues merely makes matters worse.
On This Week Joe Klein, whom no one can accuse of being a Bush fan, said that Bush repeatedly asked the generals in Iraq if they had everything they needed and they repeatedly assured him they did. But when Jerry Bremer asked them what they would do with an additional division, they said, we’d clear Baghdad. Excuse me? The American army in Iraq does not have a single general with enough guts to respond to the president’s question with “depends on what you want us to do?”
Sorry, guys, civil control of the military is not our problem. Gutless military leadership is.
Ouch. And this, mind you, is from someone who’s wanted Rumsfeld out for months.
UPDATE: Likewise from the Washington Post editorial page:
It threatens the essential democratic principle of military subordination to civilian control — the more so because a couple of the officers claim they are speaking for some still on active duty. Anyone who protested the pushback of uniformed military against President Bill Clinton’s attempt to allow gays to serve ought to also object to generals who criticize the decisions of a president and his defense secretary in wartime. If they are successful in forcing Mr. Rumsfeld’s resignation, they will set an ugly precedent. Will future defense secretaries have to worry about potential rebellions by their brass, and will they start to choose commanders according to calculations of political loyalty?
If things were so bad before, they should have resigned in protest instead of complaining publicly once they were safely in retirement and, in some cases, had books to promote.
UPDATE: Ouch. Zinni is fact-checked.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Greg Djerejian — whose hostility toward Rumsfeld is intense these days — thinks I’m unfair to the generals by linking this. Yes, they’ve served in combat. But as JFK noted in Profiles in Courage, physical courage is far more common than political courage, and it is their political courage that is in question here.
I keep hearing people say that Rumsfeld must go, but the argument about what, exactly, we should be doing instead is less clear, and the dump-Rumsfeld movement seems to me to be more about internal Pentagon politics, and about giving former war supporters political cover for changing their views, than about Rumsfeld himself. I’m entirely open to hearing suggestions about what we should be doing differently, but when those suggestions always seem to turn into Bush-bashing, or in this case proxy-Bush-bashing, I tend to tune out.
Meanwhile there’s an interesting back-and-forth on the subject between Prof. Bainbridge and his commenters here.
MORE: I guess I’d also like to hear why I should listen to those retired generals instead of these:
But the extraordinary parade of generals who have stepped forward to defend Mr. Rumsfeld includes a bevy of retired officers, including Gen. Richard B. Myers of the Air Force, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and Gen. Tommy R. Franks of the Army, who commanded American troops in the Afghanistan and Iraq conflicts.
There are a lot of generals out there, after all.
PORKBUSTERS UPDATE: Here’s a defense of Trent Lott’s “railroad to nowhere.”
TWO DUKE LACROSSE PLAYERS were arrested before 5 am this morning. (Why so early?) LaShawn Barber has questions.
UPDATE: Ed Cone offers the names of the players, and a caution:
Let me remind you, dear reader, even now: You don’t know what happened. You didn’t know before the DNA test, or after. You didn’t know when sentiment was strong against the players, or when the backlash flowed against the woman. Your opinion about the facts is not relevant. You don’t know.
Good point — though if we’re not supposed to form opinions, why is this getting so much coverage?
April 17, 2006
JUDAS: A saint for our season.
FREE SPEECH UPDATE: A reader sends an email to the campus from Northern Kentucky University President James Votruba, regarding the incident in which a professor destroyed a pro-life cross exhibit. Whole thing’s below the fold (click “read more” to read it) but here’s an excerpt:
It has been heartening that student and faculty groups that do not necessarily support the position of Northern Kentucky Right to Life have come out strongly in support of the organization’s right to be heard through their display. This reflects a commitment to the importance of free speech and inquiry as a hallmark of our University.
Professor Jacobsen has been removed from her remaining classes and placed on leave from the University. She will retire from the University at the end of this semester. The Faculty Senate, representing more than 1,000 NKU faculty members, has taken strong action today that affirms the importance of free expression as a defining quality of the University. Our campus has spoken with a strong and unified voice.
This seems right to me. Click below to read the whole thing. And bravo to Northern Kentucky University, which seems to have hit just the right tone, something that’s not to be taken for granted these days. In fact, Harvard, Yale, and Columbia have been conspicuous in their recent failures to do as well.
ABOUT TIME: “The Defense Science Board will conduct a summer study on a topic that would have been inconceivable when the Defense Department established the board 50 years ago this year: the military implications of Internet search engines, online journals and ‘blogs.'”
This would have been a better study for 2002.
MICHAEL TOTTEN offers more blogging from Iraq, with lots of photos.
DARFUR UPDATE: “China and Russia last night thwarted a year-long diplomatic drive by Britain to impose United Nations sanctions on the perpetrators in of the violence in the Darfur province of Sudan. . . . The United States, which backed the British initiative, reacted angrily by threatening to call a public vote of the 15-nation Security Council that would force Russia and China into making a formal veto.”
PLAME UPDATE: Tom Maguire has a roundup on the latest revelations and asks: “when does Josh Gerstein start getting the accolades heaped on Murray Waas?”
IT’S A PRESIDENTIAL STRAW POLL AT HUGH HEWITT’S. At the moment, Giuliani has a slim lead.
NINA BURLEIGH: “I cringed as my young son recited the Pledge of Allegiance. But who was I to question his innocent trust in a nation I long ago lost faith in?”
Who, indeed? Reader Wagner James Au, who sent the link, writes: “My question is, why do anti-war liberals get so offended when people question their patriotism, when they spend so much time questioning it themselves?”