A memo leaked this week from Spain has the international media highly agitated, slapping one another on the back, confident they have the smoking gun on President George Bush.  As they are wont to do, these pixel-stained wretches have ordered up parts of the transcript as if it were an a la carte menu.  PajamasMedia posts this edited and updated article by its Senior Editor and Spanish correspondent.

Jose Guardia, a veteran blogger from Barcelona, has translated the leaked 2003 transcript of a conversation between Bush and former Spanish Prime Minister Jose Aznar.  He fills in the blanks and provides the most telling revelations - the ones your mainstream media ignore. 

“The Egyptians are talking with Saddam Hussein. It seems he has hinted he’d be willing to leave if he’s allowed to take 1 billion dollars and all the information on WMDs.”

All the information on WMDs? What would that imply to Bush and to Aznar? And this was coming from Egyptian Intelligence in direct communication with Saddam. Wouldn’t the normal person assume from that that Saddam had WMDs or at the very least was seriously engaged in creating them? Why would he wish to preserve this information if he didn’t have any forbidden weapons programs is something that war critics should reconcile. I guess all the people who are trumpeting this leak will now stop saying that Bush lied and mislead us on the WMD issue. Can’t have it both ways. But I won’t hold my breath.

That is the astonishing revelation in the memo, but Bush’s critics entirely ignore it.

The internet news service, PajamasMedia, has published this article by Dr. Rachel Ehrenfeld, author and director of the American Center for Democracy.  She has been fighting a one woman battle for freedom of speech and the press here and across the Atlantic.  It is a story that should be told and retold.  The Islamofascist Jihad has taken on alarming cultural and social aspects of which the general public is not aware.  Read her story - it is chilling.

Since March 2002, Saudi billionaire Khalid bin Mahfouz has sued or threatened to sue in England at least 36 writers and publishers - including many Americans - who have documented his financial contributions to al Qaeda and other Islamic terror groups, through his Muwafaq (Blessed Relief) foundation, and the Saudi National Commercial Bank he owned. Everyone settled with bin Mahfouz, - except me.

Dr. Bonner R. Cohen is a senior fellow at The National Center for Public Policy Research and author of the book, The Green Wave: Environmentalism and its Consequences.  He recounts here the continuing efforts by individuals and organizations to engage former Vice-President Al Gore in public debate about his environmental campaign.

Czech President Vaclav Klaus, who addressed the General Assembly on climate change September 24, is but the latest global warming skeptic to receive the cold shoulder from Gore. In ads appearing in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and Washington Times, Klaus has called on Gore to face him in a one-on-one debate on the proposition: “Global Warming Is Not a Crisis.” Earlier in the year, similar challenges to Gore were issued by Dennis Avery, director of the Center for Global Food Issues and senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, and Lord Monckton of Brenchley, a former adviser to British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. All calls on the former vice president to face his critics have fallen on deaf ears.

I am incredulous observing a society in which a prominent former public official can run a self-serving, self-aggrandizing public campaign hectoring governments, lecturing scientists and scolding the public like some crazed environmental Jimmy Swaggart.  Even the most left wing politician gets some flack from the press, but Gore has managed to create a shield around himself and his thesis like an impenetrable bubble.  It truly is an astounding thing to see. 

  

This past Wednesday was Petrov Day.  I’ll let you read the link to find out why we all should remember a Russian officer named Mr. Petrov. 

On September 26th, 1983, Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Yevgrafovich Petrov was the officer on duty when the warning system reported a US missile launch. Petrov kept calm, suspecting a computer error.

Then the system reported another US missile launch.

And another, and another, and another.

The future Matt”zilla”? DOMESTICMAN

The daily deluge of medical information with which Americans  are confronted can be overwhelming.  Relayed to us by journalists whose lack of medical knowledge is surpassed only by their economic ignorance, the apparent facts seem to collide and conflict in a maelstrom of endless contradictions.

If you think these reports are flawed or inaccurate, you are right.  Dr. John Ionnadis has studied the methodology of medical researchers and published his findings. 

In the U. S., research is a $55-billion-a-year enterprise that stakes its credibility on the reliability of evidence and the work of Dr. Ioannidis strikes a raw nerve. In fact, his 2005 essay “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False” remains the most downloaded technical paper that the journal PLoS Medicine has ever published.

The essay mentioned above can be found here.  It is short and to the point.  Read it and take the next medical news release, due out any minute, with a grain of salt.  The results look like this:

In research published last month in the Journal of the American Medical Association, Dr. Ioannidis and his colleagues analyzed 432 published research claims concerning gender and genes. Upon closer scrutiny, almost none of them held up. Only one was replicated.

 

Robert Novak begins his column, posted yesterday at Townhall.com, as follows.  The emphasis is mine:

The Alice-in-Wonderland quality of legislating in Congress was typified this week. The Democratic Congress quickly passed a national health insurance bill, drafted in secret and protected from amendment, that constitutes the most important legislation of this session. While designed for a presidential veto, it is national health insurance — through the front, not the back, door. Democrats view it as no-lose: either landmark health care will be enacted over President George W. Bush’s veto, or, if overridden, they’ll have a lovely 2008 campaign issue.

Senator John Cornyn fought valiantly, this summer and this month, against this action by the Senate Democratic leadership.  He has received little or no recognition for his efforts while the voting public has been preoccupied with immigration related issues.  His Texas colleague in the Senate, Kay Bailey Hutchison, voted for the bill along with sixteen fellow Republican senators.

The new bill covers families with income up to $82,000 a year, threatening to crowd out the private health industry. Only Congress could conceive making families simultaneously eligible for SCHIP to help the poor and AMT (the alternative minimum tax) to punish the rich.

This is an example of the persistent, relentless legislative pressure exerted by the Democratic party to achieve their goals.  Despite public fractures and intra-party battles, the Democrats never, ever lose sight of the goal line.  From the New Deal to the Great Society to the Clinton years, in power and out, they take their success by yards, yet more often by inches.

From the day after the last election until the day before the next one, they fight, they bicker, they threaten one another.  But the Left never forgets that winning elections is what it is all about.  It is the long game and they continue to win because they will show up at the polls and vote for their party regardless of their differences.  It is the way policies eventually triumph in our system and they continue to win because of this perspective.

I did not want this day to pass without noting the anniversary of one of the Democratic Party’s contributions to the history of racial violence in America, particularly in the state of Louisiana.

On this day in 1868, a mob of Democrats massacred nearly 300 African-American Republicans in Opelousas, Louisiana. The savagery began when racist Democrats attacked a newspaper editor, a white Republican and schoolteacher for ex-slaves. Several African-Americans rushed to the assistance of their friend, and in response, Democrats went on a “Negro hunt,” killing every African-American (all of whom were Republicans) in the area they could find.

Hat Tip: Grand Old Partisan blog

After being locked up for 10 months on charges related to the assault of a white teenager in Jena, Louisiana, Mychal Bell was released last night on $45,000 bail.

A black teenager whose prosecution in the beating of a white classmate prompted a massive protest here walked out of a courthouse yesterday after a judge ordered him freed.

Mychal Bell”s release on $45,000 bail came hours after a prosecutor confirmed that he would no longer seek an adult trial for the 17-year-old. Mychal, one of the teenagers known as the Jena 6, still faces trial as a juvenile in the December beating in this small central Louisiana town.

Gadfly Al Sharpton was quick to be quoted.

“We still have mountains to climb, but at least this is closer to an even playing field,” said the Rev. Al Sharpton, who helped organize last week”s protest.

“He goes home because a lot of people left their home and stood up for him,” Mr. Sharpton said as Mychal stood smiling next to him.

No, he goes home because an overjealous District Attorney screwed up by playing legal games to get him charged as an adult. With the intense focus and resources now available to Mr. Bell, it is going to be very hard for DA Reed Walters to convict him in juvenile court where he could have been sentenced until he was 21.

Because of Mr. Walters’ errors, he is free to roam the streets while people continue to enable his violent behavior.

Great job, Mr. Walters. Do the right thing and resign.

Ah, yes, those deadly weapons we commuters have.

When Morrisville police officer Chris Gill handed him a ticket, Kent Kauffman coughed. Next thing Kauffman knew, Gill was charging him with assault on a government official.

Gill contends Kauffman intentionally coughed on him three times. According to Gill’s report, Kauffman looked into the officer’s eyes before “hacking” in his face, Morrisville spokeswoman Stacie Galloway said Wednesday.

That sounds pretty bad. And I’ve no doubt that some people would do this on purpose. Just one wee little problem:

Kauffman acknowledges that he coughed two or three times from the window of his Dodge minivan Tuesday but said it was toward Gill’s waist.

“He says I coughed in his face,” Kauffman said. “But that would only work if he had a 4-foot-long face.”

Only thing I could figure is that the cop is related to John Kerry.

 

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Well, well. It took quite a while, but the limits on religious free speech that we discussed earlier this year has now quietly passed through the Senate - attached to the defense authorization bill that people were so worked up about because of the DREAM act.

The Senate today approved a long-debated measure that would expand the federal hate crime law to cover violence against gays, and in an unusual gambit to make it difficult for President Bush to carry out his veto threat, attached it to a defense bill.

Supporters of the hate-crime legislation mustered the bare minimum of 60 votes they needed to overcome a threatened filibuster. The House approved the bill earlier this year, but neither chamber appears to have the votes to override a veto.

Yep, while everyone was faxing away on the DREAM act, homosexuals got this through the back door. So to speak.

For those of you that don’t quite remember this one, the sponsors of the bill admitted that quoting the Biblical restriction about homosexuality could lead to charges against the person quoting it if the listener were to commit a violent act against a homosexual at some point.

The president has said repeatedly that he will veto this legislation but he didn’t envision the homosexual lobby successfully attaching it to a defense authorization bill. So it’s anyone’s guess as to whether he will veto it or not.

Texas Sen. John Cornyn usually manages to get the job done but not in this case. As he said:

“All crimes of violence are crimes of hate,” Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) said.

Apparently 60 of his colleagues disagree with him and think that certain groups should have special privileges.

The D.A. of Jena, Reed Walters, had an op-ed in the New York Times yesterday attempting to explain his conduct during the whole “Jena 6″ debacle. I have a couple of quibbles, but overall I think he defends himself rather well:

I cannot overemphasize how abhorrent and stupid I find the placing of the nooses on the schoolyard tree in late August 2006. If those who committed that act considered it a prank, their sense of humor is seriously distorted. It was mean-spirited and deserves the condemnation of all decent people.

But it broke no law. I searched the Louisiana criminal code for a crime that I could prosecute. There is none.

Similarly, the United States attorney for the Western District of Louisiana, who is African-American, found no federal law against what was done.

A district attorney cannot take people to trial for acts not covered in the statutes. Imagine the trampling of individual rights that would occur if prosecutors were allowed to pursue every person whose behavior they disapproved of.

I disagree on that there was no law broken. What the kids did in hanging the noose was at least arguably “criminal mischief,” which includes “[t]ampering with any property of another, without the consent of the owner, with the intent to interfere with the free enjoyment of any rights of anyone thereto, or with the intent to deprive anyone entitled thereto of the full use of the property.” La. R.S. 14:59.

The tree was “tampered” with when the nooses were hung, and the clear intent was to intimidate black students and therefore “interfere with [their] free enjoyment” of the same. I don’t think a misdemeanor conviction for criminal mischief would have been a stretch, but it would only have meant a $500 fine. Moreover, usually criminal mischief charges are punished by schools themselves. However, there was a crime.

The “hate crime” the protesters wish me to prosecute does not exist as a stand-alone offense in Louisiana law. It’s not that our Legislature has turned a blind eye to crimes motivated by race or other personal characteristics, but it has addressed the problem in a way that does not cover what happened in Jena. The hate crime statute is used to enhance the sentences of defendants found guilty of specific crimes, like murder or rape, who chose their victims based on race, religion, sexual orientation or other factors.

He’s right. Criminal mischief isn’t included in the hate crimes law. I think “institutional vandalism” is (i.e. vandalizing an institution, like a school), but I’m fairly certain that vandalism requires actual damage. Moreover, hate crimes laws are highly dubious — motive is usually not a statutory element of any offense. You’re basically punishing ideas rather than criminal mens rea and actions, which in my mind should be held unconstitutional.

Last week, a reporter asked me whether, if I had it to do over, I would do anything differently. I didn’t think of it at the time, but the answer is yes. I would have done a better job of explaining that the offenses of Dec. 4, 2006, did not stem from a “schoolyard fight” as it has been commonly described in the news media and by critics.

Conjure the image of schoolboys fighting: they exchange words, clench fists, throw punches, wrestle in the dirt until classmates or teachers pull them apart. Of course that would not be aggravated second-degree battery, which is what the attackers are now charged with. (Five of the defendants were originally charged with attempted second-degree murder.) But that’s not what happened at Jena High School.

The victim in this crime, who has been all but forgotten amid the focus on the defendants, was a young man named Justin Barker, who was not involved in the nooses incident three months earlier. According to all the credible evidence I am aware of, after lunch, he walked to his next class. As he passed through the gymnasium door to the outside, he was blindsided and knocked unconscious by a vicious blow to the head thrown by Mychal Bell. While lying on the ground unaware of what was happening to him, he was brutally kicked by at least six people.

Imagine you were walking down a city street, and someone leapt from behind a tree and hit you so hard that you fell to the sidewalk unconscious. Would you later describe that as a fight?

No I would not. This was a brutal beating, the attempts of some to downplay the attack notwithstanding.

Only the intervention of an uninvolved student protected Mr. Barker from severe injury or death. There was serious bodily harm inflicted with a dangerous weapon — the definition of aggravated second-degree battery. Mr. Bell’s conviction on that charge as an adult has been overturned, but I considered adult status appropriate because of his role as the instigator of the attack, the seriousness of the charge and his prior criminal record.

Here, Walters may get some disagreement. He really stretched the law with his trial tactic of bringing attempted second-degree murder charges in order to get Mychal Bell into adult court. On the other hand, he thought he was justified in doing so since Bell already had an extensive violent criminal history. At best, however, you can accuse him of being overzealous. The charges people have brought that he’s racist, on the other hand, don’t seem to have any real basis in fact.

I’m satisfied with this defense, for the most part, although I would argue that Walters probably should have settled for lesser charges given the racially-charged atmosphere following the hanging of the nooses. He may have been able to prevent the firestorm that ensued had he decided not to throw the proverbial book at these students. It also would have been easier to secure convictions that wouldn’t be overturned on appeal.

Thoughts?

Today’s Houston Chronicle contains another anti-death penalty piece. This one is striking for what is not in it. First, though, just what is the issue du jour?

Death penalty opponents scrambled Wednesday to block tonight’s scheduled execution of a Texas inmate in light of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to consider whether lethal injection should be banned as cruel and unusual punishment.

Cruel and unusual? Yeah, okay. Let’s see, you get to choose between the method you used to kill someone or you get to lie on a gurney, smile at your family and drift away. I’m guessing that most of these beasts would choose the latter.

BTW, just what did this guy do to deserve the death penalty? The Chron casually mentions that he’s a double murderer.

David Dow, a professor at the University of Houston Law Center, said he will ask Gov. Rick Perry and the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals to delay the execution of Carlton Turner, a double murderer from Dallas County. Failing that, he will ask the high court to intervene.

Sounds benign enough, he’s “just” a double murderer. But what did he do? In the same issue of the Chron, an AP story ran a few minutes before the Chron’s own report describing in detail what he had done to deserve such cruel and unusual punishment.

Turner was 19 when authorities said he shot Carlton Turner Sr., 43, and Tonya Turner, 40, several times in the head. He then bought new clothes and jewelry and continued living in the family’s Irving home as their bodies decomposed. Prosecutors said Turner had dragged the bodies through the house before dumping them in the garage, then cleaned up the blood and had friends over that weekend for a party.

Neighbors called police after they hadn’t seen the couple in several days and saw Turner acting strangely and driving his parents’ cars, which they prohibited.

Turner had been a disciplinary problem as a juvenile and at age 14 sexually assaulted an 8-year-old boy. He was arrested at home on warrants for outstanding traffic violations and police found him carrying marijuana. Later that day — three days after the shootings — police returned to the house not far from the Dallas Cowboys headquarters and the foul smell led them to the bodies in the garage.

Turner, who was adopted as an infant, testified at his trial he shot his father in self-defense because his father abused him. He said his mother had locked herself in a bedroom, but he found a key, unlocked the door and shot her as she pushed to keep him out.

“People would never understand,” he said from death row. “I felt my mother couldn’t live without my father. It didn’t make any sense for her to live without him.”

What a nice young man. Party on while your adopted parents are decomposing in the garage. Telling his adopted mom to come on out of that hiding place, I know you don’t want to live without your husband. Sick.

Cruel and unusual my arse. So then, what is the solution? That’s easy enough, back to the Chron article.

The lethal injection issue, to be argued next year, is the first constitutional challenge to a method of execution since the Supreme Court upheld Utah’s use of firing squads more than 100 years ago.

Lock and load, boys. Lock and load.

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