CASHIER REFUSES TO SERVE STUDENT wearing pro-Zionist t-shirt.

OH NO: I’ve failed to capture the nuance.

I’M KIND OF SURPRISED to hear this story about John Edwards:

In his new memoir, “No Excuses: Concessions of a Serial Campaigner,” Shrum recalls asking Edwards at the outset of that campaign, “What is your position, Mr. Edwards, on gay rights?”

“I’m not comfortable around those people,” Edwards replied, according to Shrum. He writes that the candidate’s wife, Elizabeth, told him: “John, you know that’s wrong.”

Edwards’s pollster, Harrison Hickman, who was in the room during the discussion, says Shrum “is sensationalizing and taking out of context what was an honest discussion about [Edwards’s] lack of exposure to these issues and openly gay people. I don’t remember anything that expressed any kind of venom or judgment about gay people.”

Well, “I’m not comfortable” isn’t exactly venom. But surely Edwards has been around plenty of gay people in his life, in and out of the Senate.

PORKBUSTERS UPDATE: Yeah, I’ve had a lot of these, but they just keep giving me so much material to work with:

It was the $500,000 that Congress gave the Sparta Teapot Museum that made it a poster child for wasteful Washington spending.

But North Carolina’s notorious “pork barrel” project also illustrates other ways that earmarks influence lobbying, political contributions and spending.

Looking for a way to help pay for the northwestern N.C. memorial to items with both a handle and a spout, the museum’s backers decided in 2004 to team up with other area organizations, such as a local hospital, looking for federal aid.

Working through the Alleghany County Economic Development Corp., together they hired a Washington lobbying firm, the Ferguson Group, with close ties to North Carolina.

It was a good move for the museum, which ended up with a half-million dollar allocation from the 2005 Department of Housing and Urban Development budget. But it also received top billing in the 2006 “Pig Book,” an annual publication issued by Citizens Against Government Waste, a watchdog group that monitors federal spending.

The lobbyists charged the Alleghany County group $260,000 between 2004 and 2006, Senate records show. The museum’s project manager, Jonathan Halsey, says it no longer participates in the lobbying contract because the museum isn’t seeking more federal money.

Ferguson lobbyists have given thousands of dollars in recent years to the campaigns of N.C. lawmakers, including the three who helped secure the money for the teapot museum.

It’s not just about waste. It’s about corruption. You want to clean up campaign finance? Getting rid of this sort of thing would do more than McCain-Feingold ever did.

WHY TERRORISTS ATTACK JOURNALISTS: “It is only infidels that go into journalism and into the media.”

SARKOZY UPDATE: “Americanization” at the Sorbonne?

A MURTHA APOLOGY:

Democratic Rep. John Murtha of Pennsylvania sent a note of apology to Republican Rep. Mike Rogers of Michigan Wednesday, the day after a divided House denied Rogers a vote to officially reprimand the powerful senior Democrat.

Murtha apologized for his “outburst” in a handwritten note Rogers received Wednesday morning, the latter’s office confirmed. This marks his first acknowledgement of an episode between the two lawmakers on the House floor.

Last week, the powerful Democrat allegedly threatened to deny Rogers any future spending projects in defense bills after the Michigan Republican challenged his earmark request for $23 million to prevent the administration from closing an intelligence gathering facility in his western Pennsylvania district.

Well, it’s a start.

A FRED THOMPSON EXPOSE from Time.

MICKEY KAUS: “At some point the search for authenticity in state-of-the-art politicians may become fruitless.”

JULES CRITTENDEN: “Iran wants a Tet. So do the Democrats.”

THE FIRST ANNIVERSARY BLOG WEEK IN REVIEW is up!

IAIN MURRAY:

Five years ago, when we were at STATS, Howard Fienberg and I wrote a piece for the Christian Science Monitor that asked how many Muslims there were in America. We reviewed the evidence and came to the conclusion that there were about 2 million. For this, CAIR called us anti-Semitic, as it claimed there were 7-8 million.

Now, a new, exhaustive study from the Pew Research Center has asked the same question, and concludes there are about 2.35 million Muslims in America.

Story of my life.

Poor Iain.

IT MAY BECOME LEGAL to copy HD-DVD and Blu-Ray discs: “The agreement, if supported by movie studios and film companies, could allow a consumer to make a backup copy in case their original disc is damaged and another copy for their home media server.”

WHEN I READ STORIES LIKE THIS, I wonder how we’re doing as well as we are in this war: “U.S. military continues to discharge gay Arab linguists.”

FELONY FREE SPEECH in Illinois.

ALVARO VARGAS LLOSA: “Conservatism has always been pro-immigration.”

Has it always been pro-illegal immigration, though? Because that’s what seems to be bothering some people.

MORE BAD REVIEWS FOR THE NEW CONGRESS:

Barely six months after their November triumph, Democrats have backed away from their top two policy priorities, leaving House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., foundering on the key issues of Iraq and congressional corruption.

After challenging the White House with a pork-stuffed emergency supplemental funding bill that would have required U.S. military forces to begin pulling out of Iraq by a certain date, Democrats watched President Bush veto that measure, then dithered as he stood like a stone wall daring them to do it again. This week, the Democratic leadership caved, approving emergency legislation that includes 18 benchmarks, but no withdrawal — i.e., surrender — date. That outcome was a given once Bush decided to hold firm because the longer funding was delayed, the more Democrats became exposed to charges they were abandoning U.S. troops in the field. . . .

Similarly, the Democrats’ vow to end the “culture of corruption” in Congress has proven to be empty campaign rhetoric. Only two Democrats joined 187 Republicans on Wednesday in supporting an unsuccessful motion to discipline Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa., for violating an ethics rules approved by the House in January. Murtha crossed the line when he threatened to bar spending sought by two Republicans who questioned earmarks in his home district.

The same day, House Appropriations Chairman David Obey, D-Wis., disclosed that earmarks will be inserted into bills only after they’ve been approved by the House and sent to conference committees with the Senate. Under this newly rigged process, there won’t be any of those pesky amendments against things like the Bridge to Nowhere. In fact, House members will only be voting on conference committee reports, not on the thousands of earmarks that will be inserted into the bills covered by those reports. In other words, after some tentative moves in the right direction earlier this year, Democrats are now putting the corrupt system disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff called the congressional “favor factory” back behind closed doors.

Who will be the Democrats’ Abramoff? Because someone will be.

NANOTECHNOLOGY UPDATE: Adam Keiper has some thoughts on nanoethics. And you might want to read this, too.

VIA MEMEORANDUM, I see that lefty bloggers are raining scorn on Joe Klein’s report on Anbar, which I linked yesterday. Apparently, Klein’s a victim of anonymous sources in shiny uniforms leaking Administration propaganda.

Well, possibly. Here at InstaPundit, however, I have a report from a non-anonymous source, who (I suspect) isn’t shinily clothed. Here’s the latest email from Michael Yon, who is actually in Anbar, and has been for a while:

Am in the city of Hit, out in Anbar Province, with Task Force 2-7 Infantry. 2-7 took over this section of Iraq on 08 February. The area of operations comprises approximately 4,000 square km with an estimated 100,000 people. On 30 Jan, as the last of the previous unit departed, 3 mortar rounds landed about 50 yards from where I sit, wounding about 8 of the departing soldiers. Since that time, there have been no mortar attacks on base – and only one possible small mortar attack in the entire 4,000 sq km. The last battalion took nearly 150 wounded and 15 killed in action in 14 months. They fought very hard while building the ISF, and I hope those soldiers, Marines and others would be happy and proud to know that their efforts set the conditions for the current success here. Following a major clearing operation that 2-7 IN executed with Iraqi Police when they initially took over, the guns are mostly quiet now. IEDs are still a threat but are few. Over the first one-hundred days, 2-7 has taken one wounded Soldier, and unfortunately a Marine was killed by an IED.

Otherwise, 2-7 hardly have fired their weapons. Today, I accompanied LTC Doug Crissman, the commander, to three meetings with Iraqi police and civilian leadership. The meetings were important but thankfully more administrative than combat oriented. Subjects included police recruitment and local politics, and actually seemed more difficult to navigate than “simple combat.” And to think that only in January of this year, this city was a daily battle. Today, there are clear signs of development and the civilian population was out shopping. In addition to basic services being restored, the city of Hit has rebuilt its library. Citizens had stored away the books during the war here. They are preparing to re-stock the library. Glenn, you know that I do not hesitate to deliver bad news. I have no bad news to deliver today. The town of Hit clearly is doing much, much better. “Anbar the impossible” might be possible after all.

You know, if I didn’t know better I’d think that some of the lefty bloggers would actually be happier if things were going badly. Meanwhile, to me the big news about the Time story was that Time was finally catching up with what warbloggers on the scene — Michael Yon, J.d. Johannes, Bing West, etc. — have been reporting for quite a while. Instead of criticizing Time for straying (if only a bit) off the current Democratic message, people should, if anything, be criticizing it for taking so long to get to the story.

Some related thoughts — including, actually, a better criticism of what’s going on in Anbar than you’ll get from Klein’s critics on the left — here.

UPDATE: Okay, this is cool — another email from Anbar:

I’m actually sitting about 30 feet from Michael Yon as he types his dispatches, here in the town of Hit, Al Anbar province. As one of the soldiers in Task Force 2-7, I have to say it’s really heartening to have a journalist of his caliber out here reporting with us. Hit, along with Anbar generally, has settled down tremendously in the 4 months I’ve been in country this tour. It’s surreal to compare my first two months in downtown Ramadi – incessant gunfire, explosions, and unending violence – to the peacekeeping and institution-building we finally have underway here in Hit. You wouldn’t get that reading the papers, with their constant focus on the (obviously tragic) sectarian violence in Baghdad, but frankly what has happened in Anbar is near-miraculous – it’s a story that deserves to be reported far more heavily than it has so to date.

I just want to emphasize how much it means to the guys on the ground out here to have our story told by people like Michael Yon. I’m sure sitting through tedious city council meetings and governance/rule of law/economic strategy sessions with the battalion’s staff officers is a bit boring for Mr. Yon, but isn’t that a tremendous thing that we’re in that situation?

I’ve been a big fan of fan of Instapundit since my first tour in Iraq, in 2004.

Thanks,
Captain Michael Mulvania
Task Force 2-7 Infantry

I wish there were more people like Michael Yon reporting. But it’s kind of nice to know that he’s not the only InstaPundit reader in Anbar. And I don’t know Captain Mulvania, but I’m guessing that his uniform isn’t all that shiny either.

ANOTHER UPDATE: The Klein-critics apparently missed this report, too, from Neil Munro of National Journal:

Evidence of a deep break between Qaeda-affiliated forces in Iraq and the various other Sunni insurgent groups is mounting. . . . The divisions are changing the battlefield. In Anbar, which has been the heartland of the Sunni insurgency since 2004, many Sunni tribes recently united into the Anbar Salvation Front, which claims to have deployed 20,000 militiamen against Al Qaeda. U.S. military officials, trying to deepen the splits through economic aid and deals with Sunni tribes, say they have recruited more than 4,500 locals — including former insurgents — in recent months to serve in the Anbar police force. Together, the U.S. military and the Iraqi security forces, according to numerous recent media reports, have largely pacified Ramadi, the capital of Anbar province, which one Army intelligence report last year wrote off as lost.

I’m starting to think that they don’t follow the news all that closely. It’s true — as Michael Yon noted in an earlier email — that Anbar isn’t perfectly peaceful. But it’s also true that it’s changed quite drastically since it was being written off last year. That’s news — if you care about reality, rather than just rooting for America Bush to lose.

MORE: An email from a reader:

I just read your latest post on Ramadi. I’m typing this while sitting on the tarmac in Memphis, waiting for a flight to Camp Lejeune. Every NCO in my platoon is a veteran and most are here voluntarily. And we’re reservists.

Below, I’ve pasted an email I sent to Richard Fernandez yesterday. Since you have read John Robb’s “Brave New War,” (I read your review of it in CityJournal) I think you may find it of interest. See below. Feel free to excerpt, quote, or use, just please leave my name out.

By the way, here’s a local news blurb about our company. Incredibly enough, they even got lots of the facts wrong in this simple story, but oh well: Link

—–

As you can imagine, the events in Anbar are of great importance to me. All recent reports indicate that violence is down dramatically, and not just in Ramadi as I first thought, and has been publicized. We have turned the tribes to our side. Everyone from Time magazine to Michael Yon is sending signals that we’ve turned a corner there.

If this is truly the case, and not just a confluence of factors that have led to a lull, then we may have found part of the answer to your query as to how to handle 3rd Gen gangs/irregular warfare/the problem with no name (as in your post: “Total Blurring of Crime and War”): the answer is not to eradicate an insurgency, it is to create or find one’s own group that offers a reasonable alternative. This is really what has happened in Anbar: the tribes were colluding with Al Qaeda and other criminal and terror groups, but now we have turned them and empowered them. This is not nation-building; it may even be the opposite. Some time ago, Robert Kaplan wrote this in the LA Times:

“Those who proclaim today that the only real solution to the Arab dilemma is political freedom are correct. The problem is that they are describing a process that could encompass several bloody decades. After all, it took centuries for stable democracy as we know it to evolve in Europe. In this Darwinian shaking-out process, the new forms of political legitimacy may more closely resemble militarized social welfare organizations such as Hezbollah and the Al Mahdi army than the ramshackle contrivances of the European model that we saw in the post-colonial era.”

Isn’t this what we are seeing in Anbar? A tribe that is allied with the US is much more similar to Hezbollah than it is to a nation-state.

Here’s the real takeaway though: this never would have happened without some sort of American presence in Iraq. It was not diplomats that turned the tribes, it was military officers. That is the secret that will be hard to swallow: we are in an age wherein the opposite of the ‘exit strategy’ will have to be the lynchpin of strategy: presence, not early exit, is what is required in these broad swaths of the world that where instability threatens US interests. The key will be not to figure out whether to be there or not, which is the current debate. The key will be to figure out how much to be there and in what form: soldier, diplomat, spy, or some other category that has yet to be determined: perhaps a combo of all three, or perhaps some privatized version of any one of them.

Let’s hope that this is right, and that we’ll stick it out long enough to make it work.

ANOTHER SHIFT IN EUROPE: “Security officials from Europe’s largest countries have thrown their weight behind the EU Commission’s plans to map out mosques on the continent to identify imams who preach radical Islam that raises the threat of homegrown terrorism. The project, to be finished by the fall, will focus on the roles of imams, their training, their ability to speak in the local language and their source of funding, EU Justice and Home Affairs Commissioner Franco Frattini told a news conference.”

BIZARRE JUXTAPOSITIONS: Side-by-side recommendations for The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War, and The Mystery Method: How to Get Beautiful Women Into Bed.

Kind of reminds me of that old joke from the sixties: “‘Make Love Not War?’ Hell, in my day we did both!”

GATEWAY PUNDIT notes another grim milestone.

DO TELL: “Long-standing rumours that the former French president Jacques Chirac holds a secret multi-million-euro bank account in Japan appear to have been confirmed by files seized from the home of a senior spy.”

MY EARLIER POST ON THE AIR-POWERED CAR led a lot of readers to write with questions about crashworthiness. Reader Hank Bradley wrote: “I too lust after that Air Car. It’s exactly right for urban conditions. HOWEVER: with a tank full of air at 4350 psi behind your seat, you’d better consider the effects of a collision, say one that pierces that tank with a piece of metal with several thousand pounds of auto behind it. If your car didn’t suddenly simulate an Iraqi car bomb, it may elect to simulate a jet plane, or at very least provide you with spontaneous ejection seats for you and the whole family.”

I don’t know how dangerous it is — a gas tank is potentially explosive, too, after all — but the likelihood is that these things will appear first in places like India and China, where neither the government nor consumers care as much about safety. And from the standpoint of oil consumption and greenhouse emissions, early introduction in those places is actually better, since (1) oil and greenhouse emissions are fungible; but (2) the automobile market there is growing much, much faster than in Western countries, and consumers are more interested in urban commuter vehicles than in Interstate / Autobahn cruisers.

UPDATE: Matt Sullivan, who wrote the air car piece for PM, emails:

Just checked out your interesting back-and-forth on the air-powered car. Thought I’d give you the lowdown on the air tank safety–an important part of this innovation that I couldn’t fit into a tiny story for the magazine.

The tanks are actually very safe, because MDI (the company that makes the car) has developed an explosion-proof carbon fiber compressed air tank. It’s so non-flammable, in fact, that Airbus has contracted MDI to build the
carbon fiber tanks for their planes. More here (link) and video here (Link), and MDI’s spokesman told me
this:

“We’re really going to try to optimize the technology because the air tank is one of the major things–one of the major innovations–in the car. We’ve really focused on having the best kind of air tank because, obviously, in case of accidents, we can’t afford having any problems.”

And Tobias Buckell notes that a lot of people have an exaggerated idea of air tanks’ explosiveness, based on the movie Jaws. He notes that “Mythbusters”, er, exploded this myth a while back:

Here’s the mythbuster link:

http://www.mythbustersfanclub.com/mb2/content/view/185/40/

I know you scuba dive from reading your blog (as did I when I lived in the Caribbean) so you’ll know the average air tank is pressurized at 2-3,000 PSI, which is only looking to be about 1,000 less than the air car, so this not all that different from handling scuba equipment.

Secondly, one would expect engineers to put a simple crumple zone around the pressure tank as well.

So no blowing up, crumple zone, and according to the mythbusters episode here’s what happens when you shoot a dive tank:

“When the tank was punctured by a bullet it simply decompressed quickly, causing it to fly around like a compressed-air rocket. The team was only able to make the tank explode in the end by using explosives.”

So the car might get shoved around a bit, but depending on how much air, how bad the crash, or if there is no crumple zone.

Frankly, I’d rather sit on compressed air than a fuel tank!

Yeah, gasoline’s pretty explosive.

ECO-TERROR UPDATE:

Declaring fires set at a police station, an SUV dealership and a tree farm acts of terrorism, a federal judge Wednesday sentenced the first of 10 members of a radical environmental group to 13 years in prison.

U.S. District Judge Ann Aiken commended Stanislas Meyerhoff for having the courage to “do the right thing” by informing on his fellow arsonists after his arrest. But he declared his efforts to save the earth by setting fires were misguided and cowardly, and contributed to an unfair characterization of others working legally to protect the environment as radicals.

“It was your intent to scare and frighten other people through a very dangerous and psychological act — arson,” Aiken told Meyerhoff. “Your actions included elements of terrorism to achieve your goal. . . . Prior to sentencing, Wood asked for leniency, arguing that most of the fires were not acts of terrorism because they were set at businesses, not government facilities.

The prosecution countered that based on communiqués issued after the fires, the blazes were meant to retaliate against the U.S. Forest Service for allowing a Vail ski resort to expand into a national forest, the University of Washington for genetic-engineering research and the government for prosecuting radicals who set earlier fires at the SUV dealership.

Read the whole thing. This kind of behavior, like the terrorism aimed at abortion clinics and animal-rights attacks on scientific researchers, is dangerous, destructive and needs to be stepped on, hard.