What Do Jews Do at a Stop Sign? via Jewish Connection

I've been studying some Talmud and number 6 is especially funny.

1. An average Jew doesn't bother to read the sign but will stop if the car in front of him does.

2. A fundamentalist stops at the sign and waits for it to tell him to go.

3. An Orthodox Jew
does one of two things: a) Stops at the sign, says, "Blessed are you, O
Lord our God, King of the universe, who has given us your commandment
to stop," waits 3 seconds according to his watch, and then proceeds.

b) Takes another route to work that doesn't have a stop sign so that he doesn't run the risk of disobeying the halachah.

4. A Haredi
does the same thing as the Orthodox Jew, except that he waits 10
seconds instead of 3. He also replaces his brake lights with 1000-watt
searchlights and connects his horn so that it is activated whenever he
touches the brake pedal.

5. An Orthodox woman concludes that she is not allowed to observe the mitzvah of stopping because she is niddah. This is a dilemma, because the stop sign is located on her way to the mikveh.

6. A Talmudic scholar consults his holy books and finds these comments on the stop sign:

R. Meir says: He who does not stop shall not live long.

R. Hillel says: Cursed is he who does not count to three before proceeding.

R. Shimon ben Yehudah says: Why three? Because the Holy One, blessed be He, gave us the Law, the Prophets, and the Writings.

R. ben Yitzhak says: Becase of the three patriarchs.

R. Yehuda says: Why bless the Lord at a stop sign? Because it says, "Be still, and know that I am God."

R.
Yehezkel says: When Jephthah returned from defeating the Ammonites, the
Holy One, blessed be He, knew that a donkey would run out of the house
and overtake his daughter; but Jephthah did not stop at the stop sign,
and the donkey did not have time to come out. For this reason he saw
his daughter first and lost her. Thus was he judged for his
transgression at the stop sign.

R. Gamaliel says: R. Hillel,
when he was a baby, never spoke a word, though his parents tried to
teach him by speaking and showing him the words on a scroll. One day
his father was driving through town and did not stop at the sign. Young
Hillel called out, "Stop, father!" In this way, he began reading and
speaking at the same time. Thus it is written, "Out of the mouths of
babes."

R. ben Natan says: When were stop signs created? On the fourth day, as it is written, "Let them serve as signs."

But R. Yehoshua says...."[continues for three more pages]

7. A Breslover Chasid sees
the sign and prays, saying "Ribono shel Olam, [Master of the world]here
I am, traveling on the road in Your service, and I am about to face who
knows what danger at this intersection in my life. So please watch over
me and help me to get through this stop sign safely." Then, "looking
neither to left nor right" as Rebbe Nachman
advises, he joyfully accepts the challenge, remains focused on his
goal, even as the car rolls backward for a moment, then hits the
accelerator and forges bravely forward, overcoming all obstacles which
the yetzer hara might put in his path.

8. A Lubavitcher
Chasid stops at the sign and reads it very carefully in the light of
the Rebbe's teachings. Next, he gets out of the car and sets up a
roadside mitzvah-mobile, taking this opportunity to ask other Jewish drivers who stop at the stop sign whether they have put on tefillin today or whether they light Shabbat candles. Having now settled there, he steadfastly refuses to give up a single inch of the land he occupies until Mashiach comes.

9. A Conservative Jew
calls his rabbi and asks whether stopping at this sign is required by
unanimous ruling of the Commission on Jewish Law or if there is a
minority position. While waiting for the rabbi's answer, he is ticketed
by a policeman for obstructing traffic.

10.
A secular Jew rejects the sign as a vestige of an archaic and outmoded
value system with no relevance to the modern world, and ignores it
completely.

11. a Reform Jew
coasts up to the sign while contemplating the question, "Do I
personally feel commanded to stop?" During his deliberation he edges
into the intersections and is hit from behind by the secular Jew.

12. A Reconstructionist Jew
reasons: First, this sign is a legacy of our historic civilization and
therefore I must honor it. On the other hand, since "the past has a
vote and not a veto" I must study the issue and decide whether the
argument in favor of stopping is spiritually, intellectually, and
culturally compelling enough to be worth perpetuating. If so, I will
vote with the past; if not, I will veto it. Finally, is there any way
that I can revalue the stop sign's message so as to remain valid for
our own time?

13. A Renewal Movement
Jew meditates on whether the stop sign applies in all of the
kabbalistic Four Worlds [body-emotion-mind-spirit] or only in some of
them, and if so, which ones? Must he stop feeling? Thinking? Being?
Driving? Since he has stopped to breathe and meditate on these
questions, he is quite safe while he does so, baruch HaShem.

14.
A bibilical scholar points out that there are a number of stylistic
differences between the first and second halves of the passage "STOP."

For
Example, "ST" contains no enclosed areas and five line endings, whereas
"OP" contains two enclosed areas and only one line termination. He
concludes that the first and second parts are the work of different
authors who probably lived several centuries apart.

Later
scholars determine that the second half is itself actually written by
two separate authors because of similar stylisitic differences between
the "O" and "P".

15. Because
of the difficulties in interpretation, another biblical scholar amends
the text, changing "T" to "H." "SHOP" is much easier to understand in
this context than "STOP" because of the multiplicity of stores in the
area. The textual corruption probably occurred because "SHOP" is so
similar to "STOP" on the sign several streets back that it is a natural
mistake for a scribe to make. Thus the sign should be interpreted to
announce the existence of a commercial district.

16.
Yet another biblical scholar notes that the stop sign would fit better
into another intersection three streets back. Clearly it was moved to
its present location by a later redactor. He thus interprets the present intersection as though the stop sign were not there.

Can VCRs and land-based telephones be far behind?

NEW YORK -- Nikon Corp., which helped popularize the 35mm camera five
decades ago, will stop making most of its film cameras to concentrate
on digital models.

With all the advances in technology over the past 10 years alone, isn't it amazing that we're still using light bulbs in our homes which have basically remained unchanged for over 100 years?



Edison's lab 1876, Home Depot 2006...same frickin' thing.

Ah, the good old days when Israel was in control....

Some people (Palestinians - ed.) even expressed open nostalgia for the days before the 1993 Oslo accords, when Israel still occupied the territory and Palestinians were freer to travel across the country. More than 100,000 Palestinians from Gaza worked in Israel before the agreements, and thousands were still commuting through the fortresslike border crossings when Israel withdrew in September.

The Arab answer to Barbie has been selling like hot cakes for Eid Al Adha, the most important holiday in the Muslim calendar, not least because it is cheaper than its American rival, although both are made in China.

Fulla is not the first Islamic doll but none of her predecessors have taken the regional market by storm like she has, selling some 2 million since its creation two years ago by the Emirates-based NewBoy Design Studio.

Saudi Arabia's religious police had then just banned "Barbie the Jewish doll", whose "revealing clothes and shameful postures, accessories and tools are a symbol of decadence to the perverted West."

And I always though Barbie was the ultimate shiksa!  I also didn't know it was un-Islamic to accesorize. Also, exactly what kind of "tools" does Barbie come with anyway?

Lately it seems that most of the things I may have commented on were too complex to give a full accounting to given the limited time I've had this week, so I'll just post a couple of quick hits of interest.  I mean, does the world really need another non-lawyer's ignorant opinion on Judge Alito's position on 50 year old case law?

Spears tops Mr. Blackwell's 'Worst Dressed' list - This is like a Fark-style invitation to the media to come up with the worst picture of Britney Spears they can find.  Then again, it's not too hard a challenge, is it?



OK - I have to post something about the Alito hearings.   But Enough About You, Judge; Let's Hear What I Have To Say 

Judge Alito, who had been sitting without expression through Mr.
Biden's musings, interrupted the senator midword, got out three
sentences, then settled in for nearly 26 minutes more of Mr. Biden,
with the senator doing most of the talking. With less than a minute to
spare, Mr. Biden concluded, thanked Judge Alito for "being responsive,"
then said to Mr. Specter that "I want to note that for maybe the first
time in history, Biden is 40 seconds under his time."

The audience laughed appreciatively.

---------------------------

And you though the turkeys had it bad at Thanksgiving; at least there's only 300 million Americans - for 1.2 billion people, it's Eid Mubarak!  Streets annually run with blood as sheep and cattle have their throats
cut on pavements and waste ground to commemorate Abraham’s willingness
to sacrifice his son for God.  I love when this stuff runs under the "Oddly Enough" section as if it's a one-off story that isn't happening regularly all over the world every year.   Talk about taking the bible literally, yeesh.  In my attempt at moral equivalency, I will mention that in some sects of Orthodox Judaism a chicken is slaughtered on the afternoon before Yom Kippur (Day of Atonement) in a ceremony called kappores.
Although not actually a sacrifice in the biblical sense, the death of
the chicken reminds the penitent sinner that his or her life is in
God's hands. A woman brings a hen to be slaughtered, a man brings a
rooster. The meat is donated to the poor.  This is a minority within a minority of the Jewish population though.

Sgt. Mark Seavey confronts Democrat Reps. Jim Moran and John Murtha at a town hall meeting in Arlington, Va., earlier this week.

The highlight is when he says, "And Congressman Moran, 200 of your constituents just returned from Afghanistan. We never got a letter from you; we never got a visit from you. You didn't come to our homecoming. The only thing we got from any of our elected officials was one letter from the governor of this state thanking us for our service in Iraq, when we were in Afghanistan. That's reprehensible. I don't know who you two are talking to but the morale of the troops is very high."

Powerline reports on what happened next:

Confusing himself with the host of Jeopardy, Moran responded: "That wasn't in the form of a question, it was in the form of a statement." Perhaps Moran can find his true calling as a game show host.

Video here.

I realize that some of my readers really don't like the tone of the bloggers who report this kind of thing, but then who else does report it?

As an aside, I think that Murhta's comments that he would not join the military today are incredibly hurtful to the troops. Since the "news" that the administration is fighting an unjust/immoral/unnecessary/incompentently managed war is about 3 years old now, to believe what Murtha does you have to assume that the troops that are serving now volunteered because they are stupid, desperate, or amoral themselves.

Once again, the media proclaims that everybody loves the Democrats!

Public Partial to Democrats, Poll Says - Majority Surveyed Back Power Shift reports the Boston Globe

Poll Displays Desire for D.C. Power Swing cries The Olympian

49% in poll favor Democratic control of Congress says the Dallas Morning News (no link on their site)

Poll says Democrats preferred for Congress

Future Looks Bleak for GOP

In an ominous election-year sign for Republicans, Americans are leaning
sharply toward wanting Democrats to take control of Congress, an
AP-Ipsos poll finds. Democrats are favored 49 percent to 36 percent.

Wow, if a Presidential election were held today, Democrats would win in a landslide of historic proportions!

Unfortunately for most Americans who read this crap in their morning newspaper or see it on the evening news, it's all bullsh*t.  The poll results can be found here and guess what.  Of those surveyed, 52% were Democrats and 40% were Republicans.  Do ya think that's why the Democrats were favored by 13 points in the poll?  On top of that those in the poll that described themselves as "strongly Democrat" was 20% while those who were "strongly Republican" was 13%.  So not only did they poll many more Democrats, but more partisan ones as well. 

One might also wonder why the President's approval rating is at 40% in this particular poll, reinforcing the media meme of Bush's poor performance.

I have written about this type of thing several times and have yet to see a poll where Republicans so heavily outnumber Democrats in a major poll.

For those who keep looking for ways to understand terrorists...to put themselves in a terrorists shoes so to speak, can they finally scratch desperate poverty from their talking points?

London suicide bomber left 121,000 pounds in will

One of the four suspected Islamic extremists involved in the July 7, 2005 suicide bomb attacks in London left 121,000 pounds (175,455 euros, 212,433 dollars) in a will, The Sun reported.

Shehzad Tanweer, who worked part-time in a fish and chip shop in his home city of Leeds, northern England, blew himself up at Aldgate Underground station, killing eight people and injuring dozens more.

In all, 52 commuters died in the terrorist attacks on three Underground trains and a double-decker bus while more than 700 people were injured.

An official from the High Court probate department was quoted by the newspaper as saying that 22-year-old Tanweer's estate was a net figure (ed. note - !!!!) following the deduction of loans, debts and funeral costs.

If Eric Clapton is God - what does that make Howard Stern?

Howard Stern to get $220 million in Sirius stock

Sirius Satellite Radio Inc. will give Howard Stern 34 million shares of stock _ worth about $220 million at today's prices _ because the company has met agreed-upon targets for
gaining new subscribers under its 2004 deal with the shock jock.

In a regulatory filing Thursday, Sirius said its subscriber count as of Dec. 31, 2005, exceeded the target it had agreed upon with Stern in October 2004, when it made a five-year deal with him.

The man may be crude pervert, but he is the Einstein of crude perverts.

Saddam Hussein phoned George W. Bush. "I had a dream about the United States," he said. "I could see the whole country, and over every building and home was a banner."

"What was on the banner?" asked Mr. Bush.

"LONG LIVE SADDAM!" answered the dictator.

"I'm so glad that you called," said President Bush, "because I too had a dream. In my dream, I saw Iraq and it was more beautiful than ever; totally rebuilt with many tall, gleaming office buildings, large residential subdivisions with swimming pools in every yard; and over every building and home was a big, beautiful banner."

"What did the banner say?" asked Saddam.

"I don't know," answered Bush, "I can't read Hebrew".

Every Texan, native or not, is a Longhorn tonight.

As I perused the NYTimes.com homepage and saw the link for tomorrow's lead editorial, The Sago Mine Disaster, I laughed and said to myself, "I bet they try to blame it on Bush".

They're so predictable.

Whether or not that was a factor in the Sago mine's history, the Bush administration's cramming of important posts in the Department of the Interior with biased operatives from the coal, oil and gas industry is not reassuring about general safety in the mines.

Ooooh...OPERATIVES. How sneaky sounding. At least they're upfront in saying that it's not important to them if Bush or any of his people actually had anything to do with the disaster. And of course they're also admitting that they don't feel they need to research the issue before leveling criticism. Perhaps a simple statistic like how many mining deaths/accidents have there been in recent years compared to the past? I mean, how hard could that be to get from their union friends?

Was there any thought involved in putting together this editorial or was that the sound of a knee jerking?

According to the Dept. of Labor's Mine Safety and Health Administration, the number of coal mining deaths and injuries declined 20% in the first three years of the Bush presidency. Whether or not Bush's choices for the Dept. of Interior leadership were any factor, it has to make us feel good that he's in charge. See how stupid that sounds when the shoe's on the other foot?

My dad suffered a brain aneurysm a little over a year ago and it gave our family the scare of our lives. Luckily he didn't have to have brain surgery and is walking around as good as new. It seems that Ariel Sharon is in a much worse position. Regardless of the outcome, I don't see how he would be able to function as Prime Minister for the foreseeable future.

Just as those Palestinians who wished to see Ehud Barak gone in 2001 got more than they bargained for, those that will surely be handing our candies to the children tonight should think twice about what they wish for.

Back on December 21, Reuters reported the following:

In a stinging rebuke to the Bush administration, a U.S. appeals court
refused on Wednesday to transfer Jose Padilla from U.S. military
custody to federal authorities in Florida until the Supreme Court
considers his case.

This should take some of the sting out:

The Supreme Court agreed Wednesday to let the military transfer accused "enemy combatant" Jose Padilla to Miami to face criminal charges in at least a temporary victory for theBush administration.

The justices overruled a lower court, which had attempted to block the transfer as part of a rebuke to the White House.

That's funny, I thought the Supreme Court wasthe final word on whether something is legal and constitutional in this country which would make this a final victory regarding this matter of the transfer. There's nothing partial or temporary about it - it will happen.

Or as talkleft.com declared at the time:

The ultra conservative Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals showed some backbone today and denied the Government's request to move indicted detainee Jose Padilla to the custody of the Attorney General from military custody. You can read the opinion here. (pdf) Big defeat for Bush.

Which just goes to show you it ain't over 'til the Supreme Court sings.

I can't imagine the relief and joy that the families of these 12 miners must feel in the wee hours of this morning. I pray that when I wake up, that the reports turn out to be true.

Families Say 12 W. Va. Miners Found Alive

God Bless Them All.

Damn.

After Reports to the Contrary, Only One Miner Survives

The NY Times has this to say about "whistle-blowers" in an editorial called "On the Subject of Leaks".

A democratic society cannot long survive if whistle-blowers are criminally punished for revealing what those in power don't want the public to know - especially if it's unethical, illegal or unconstitutional behavior by top officials. Reporters need to be able
to protect these sources, regardless of whether the sources are motivated by policy disputes or nagging consciences. This is doubly important with an administration as dedicated as this one is to extreme secrecy.

At first glance, this seems like a reasonable argument. It sounds and feels right. However....

First of all no one has been criminally punished yet for the leak regarding NSA surveillance. Second of all, no one is a "whistle-blower" until the offending party can be proved to have done something wrong or illegal, until then they are just traitors. In fact, regardless of the nature of the supposed crime by President Bush or others, it is certainly illegal to reveal the details of a classified effort to surveil enemy activity in wartime and the revelation of those secrets (we are allowed to keep secrets from the enemy, aren't we?) is certainly damaging to national security. In a war against terrorism, intelligence gathering is just as important as traditional battlefield maneuvers, maybe even more so. To let the enemy know what we are doing to gather intelligence on them is the same as an old fashioned revealing of our field position and troop strength in a traditional war. Loose lips sink ships and all that.

(None of this takes into account that senior congresspersons were aware of the NSA's stepped up domestic activities and chose to keep their concerns to themselves.)

Yes, would-be whistle-blowers do get indicted. And many had uncovered real concerns that it was in the public interest to know. But they also have to play within the bounds of the law. Whoever leaked the details of the NSA program was almost certainly not acting within the bounds of the law. If there was a crime involved in leaking Valerie Plame's name to the press, the leaker should be discovered and punished. The same holds true here. The Times seems to be advocating the position that of you think you are doing the right thing, you should use every avenue available to you, legal or not. I thought that's exactly what they are fighting AGAINST concerning Bush's handling of the war. Bush can't push the boundaries of the law to defend the nation (no reporter has claimed that he was doing otherwise), but others can break the law to stop him. No hypocrisy there.

It's all about the concept of leveling the playing field. That's why suicide bombers are OK in some far left circles. What other weapons do the poor Islamists/insurgents have? Who are we to demand any kind of moral standard from them when they are the weaker party in the conflict?

I'm not sure what's all this talk about "doubly important" and "extreme secrecy" is? Is that something like "double-secret probation"?

I wonder if James Risen will reimburse his leaker friend(s) with a percentage of the money he receives from his new book.



And you know what else - since no one in the mainstream media or on the internet that I've seen has the balls to do it - maybe they think it will jinx our luck - I'm going to say it -
IN THE LAST 4 YEARS, 3 MONTHS AND 25 DAYS THERE HAVE BEEN ZERO SUCCESSFUL ATTACKS ON THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA OR IT'S EMBASSIES AND CONSULATES OVERSEAS BY ANY TERRORIST GROUP MUSLIM OR OTHERWISE. This is almost a year longer than it took for us to fight WWII, and yet many consider us "not as safe". Thank you President Bush. Look at this list to find a list of terrorist attacks against US interests in almost every year since 1979. Almost 4 1/2 years without an incident is NOT dumb luck. ESPECIALLY when liberals have claimed since the day we stepped foot in Afghanistan that the Muslim street would rise up against us and a wave of hatred would sweep across the world.

I feel much better now.

The trailer for The DaVinci Code is online now. Cool. It also seems like it's in some kind of hi-resolution, the trailer seems to play on my laptop clearer than DVDs, although it could just be my imagination. What a great book.

According to the Jerusalem Post:

Two Palestinians were killed and three wounded late Saturday in an IAF air strike in the northern Gaza Strip, a Palestinian official said, the first fatal attack in the border area since Israel declared it a "no-go" zone.

The IDF said the terrorists were spotted preparing to fire a rocket from the area of Elei Sinai, one of the 21 settlements evacuated during the pullout from Gaza.

According to WAFA, the Palestine News Agency:

Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) killed Saturday night two citizens in the northern Gaza Strip city of Beit Lahia, medical sources said.

The sources reported that two citizens were killed by Israeli artillery which bombarded the al-Manshiya neighborhood in the city.

Pinpoint attack on two terrorists, or random bombardment of a residential neighbohood? Here's a map of Gaza showing the difference between Elei Sinai and Beith Lahia.

I like the ABC News headline - 2 Palestinians Slain in Israeli Airstrike. Isn't the word "slain" usually used for homicide and senseless killing? I guess I know who they believe. I also like the way the lead paragraph of their Associated Press story is written:

Two Palestinians were killed in Israel's first deadly airstrike in a Gaza border area it recently put off-limits, just as a truce that has drastically reduced violence between the two sides formally ended.

No mention of what the two Palestinians may have been doing (until later in the article) and obviously suggesting that Israel took advantage of the ending of a "truce" to kill people as soon as possible, even though Israel was never party to the "truce". This isn't just misleading reporting, but false.

There's more rich bull**** from the Palestinian Interior Ministry which claims that, "a shell hit a Palestinian post, hindering police efforts to stop militants from firing a rocket at Israel."

I wonder which of these lies the Palestinian Human Rights organizations will use on their websites denouncing Israel.

Maybe it's just a slow news day, but there were quite a few inspirational/interesting stories in the Metro section of this morning's Dallas Morning News.

Spat with mom is one for the books - Pre-teen gets mad at her mom, writes a novel about what it would be like to run away and sells several hundred copies. There's a website at www.runawayhotel.com and a portion of the proceeds goes to CITY House, a Plano shelter for teens.

Making sure their cups runneth over too - The Rev. Joel Pulis starts a church specifically to cater to the mentally handicapped who wouldn't normally be welcome in most other churches. (It made me wonder what the Jewish perspective on disruptive people at services is?)

What makes FW safer than Dallas? - Dallas is the 5th most dangerous city and Fort Worth is the 9th safest despite the fact that they are less than an hour apart by car. Is is just a matter of a half-penny tax directed toward fighting crime?

The NY Times begins the New Year with more leaks about the "domestic spying" program.

The top deputy to then-Attorney General John Ashcroft refused two years ago to approve important parts of the secret program that allows domestic eavesdropping without warrants, prompting two leading White House aides to try to win the needed approval from Mr. Ashcroft himself while he was hospitalized after a gall bladder operation, according to officials knowledgeable about the episode.

With Mr. Ashcroft recuperating from gall bladder surgery in March 2004, his deputy, James B. Comey, who was then acting as attorney general, was unwilling to give his certification to crucial aspects of the classified program, as required under the procedures set up by the White House, said the officials, who asked for anonymity because the program is classified and they are not authorized to discuss it publicly.

Are they not authorized to discuss it publicly, but authorized to discuss it with newspaper reporters? A more appropriate description would probably be that they are not supposed to divulge this information to anyone. If I were to try that crap with MY employer's confidential information, I'd be in jail faster than you can say Benedict Arnold.

Of course there's also the possibility that as Acting Attorney General, Mr. Comey didn't feel it was his place to make an important decision on the program when the Attorney General was fully capable of making a determination in his stable, non-life threatening condition at the hospital.

I'm a little confused by this story in general in that the program had been in place for about 2 1/2 years at the time, supposedly with the knowldge and frequent review of the Justice Department - yet there is no explanation of why the Justice Department would suddenly be concerned with specific aspects of the program.

The most important aspect of the article for me is this - which in my opinion should have been the headline:

"...The Justice Department...oversaw an audit..on the program.

The audit examined a selection of cases to see how the N.S.A. went about determining that it had probable cause to believe that someone in the United States, including American citizens, had sufficient ties to Al Qaeda to justify the extraordinary step of eavesdropping on their phone calls and e-mail messages without a court warrant. That review is not known to have found any instances of documented abuses.

You mean with Bush's lust for power, he didn't even target one person by mistake? Not one political enemy? I knew he was incompetent, but this is ridiculous - he doesn't even know how to abuse power correctly!

----------

UPDATE from Newsweek to appear in their January 9th issue:

On one day in the spring of 2004, White House chief of staff Andy Card and the then White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales made a bedside visit to John Ashcroft, attorney general at the time, who was stricken with a rare and painful pancreatic disease, to try—without success—to get him to reverse his deputy, Acting Attorney General James Comey, who was balking at the warrantless eavesdropping. Miffed that Comey, a straitlaced, by-the-book former U.S. attorney from New York, was not a "team player" on this and other issues, President George W. Bush dubbed him with a derisive nickname, "Cuomo," after Mario Cuomo, the New York governor who vacillated over running for president in the 1980s. (The White House denies this; Comey declined to comment.)"

Personally the last part seems rather dubious to me, but it does clarify the point on whether Ashcroft approved "warrentless eavesdropping". I still don't understand how this only came up 2 1/2 years after the program supposedly started.

Also, Newsweek reports that the domestic program targets 500 Americans a day. This is somewhat misleading in that the original December 16 report by the NY Times says that 500 persons in the United States (an unknown number of whom may be Americans) were monitored at any given time.

Freed British hostage to remain in Gaza

A 25-year-old British human rights worker kidnapped and later released by Palestinian gunmen in the Gaza Strip will stay in the region, her family said on Saturday....

“Kate remains committed and passionate about working alongside the Palestinians to improve their external image and alleviate the difficult conditions being suffered by the Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip.”

I tried for a while to come up with an insightful comment to this story, but I just couldn't. These people have such a different mindset than I do that I can't even begin to fathom what motivates them. You can check out the organization that Kate Burton works for here.

The only comment I will make to those who might go to that link is to please recognize that Israeli actions are presented totally out of context as always being random acts of violence and Palestinian "militants" who are targeted by Israelis are just "citizens", etc.

A story by Tom Lasseter of Knight-Ridder informs us (or at least leaves the impression) that all Iraqi army units with Kurdish troops don't care about Iraq at all as a unified nation and are ready to kill their Arab comrades in order to create an independent Kurdistan.

The soldiers said that while they wore Iraqi army uniforms they still considered themselves members of the Peshmerga - the Kurdish militia - and were awaiting orders from Kurdish leaders to break ranks. Many said they wouldn't hesitate to kill their Iraqi army comrades, especially Arabs, if a fight for an independent Kurdistan erupted... The Kurds have readied their troops not only because they've long yearned to establish an independent state but also because their leaders expect Iraq to disintegrate, senior leaders in the Peshmerga -
literally, "those who face death" - told Knight Ridder... The interviews with Kurdish troops, however, suggested that as the American military transfers more bases and areas of control to Iraqi units, it may be handing the nation to militias that are bent more on
advancing ethnic and religious interests than on defeating the insurgency and preserving national unity.

Iraqi officials denied that the story was representative of Iraqi troops. (Althought my gut feeling so far is to believe the reporter, I find it a little disconcerting that he has the byline on this report that criticizes his own work - needless to say he takes the opportunity to rebut the official's comments).

In October, Lasseter reported a similar story about how Shiites in the Iraqi army are only loyal to their own kind.

A week spent eating, sleeping and going on patrol with a crack unit of the Iraqi army - the 4,500-member 1st Brigade of the 6th Iraqi Division - suggests that (Bush's) strategy is in serious trouble. Instead of rising above the ethnic tension that's tearing their nation apart, the
mostly Shiite troops are preparing for, if not already fighting, a civil war against the minority Sunni population.... Day to day, the Iraqi officers mostly run their own show, carrying out most of the patrols and running checkpoints without help. Increasingly, however, they look and operate less like an Iraqi national army unit and more like a Shiite militia.

It is very hard to counter this kind of first person reporting - the best I could do was to try and find other examples of Lasseter's reporting on Iraq and see if I could detect any type of bias.

I will say that this report from an article he wrote in 2003 disturbed me:

Last Thursday, residents in At Agilia - a village north of Baghdad - said two of their farmers and five others from another village wre killed when U.S. soldiers shot them while they were watering their fields of sunflowers, tomatoes and cucumbers.

I just can't believe that U.S. soldiers would take potshots at farmers watering their crops. Even if I were to belive that this was possible, I am bothered by the uncritical reporting. At least try and get a "no comment" from the military if you believe that your countrymen are massacring innocent civilians. There don't seem to be any corroborating or conflicting reports on the internet regarding this incident. (I wonder if this type of thing counts in the quoted estimates of Iraqis killed in the war, although I couldn;t find it on iraqibodycount.net.)

In July 2004, Lasseter was embedded with U.S. troops and reported on their low morale:

Sgt. 1st Class James Tilley was on patrol on the road outside Ramadi later
that afternoon, sitting in his Humvee for an hour or two in one spot - sweating
profusely in the 105-degree heat - before moving a few hundred yards down the
road to another place.

The patrol is designed to ward off insurgents from trying to put bombs in the
road.

"A lot of times, I look at this place and wonder what have we really done.... When we first got here, we all wanted to change it and make it better, but now I don’t give a s---," he said. "What the hell am I here for?"

Staff Sgt. A.J. Dean was on the same stretch of road a couple of nights later, and his tone was similar to Tilley’s. "I don’t have any idea of what we’re trying to do out here.

I don’t know what the (goal) is, and I don’t think our commanders do either," he said. "I feel deceived personally. I don’t trust anything (Defense Secretary Donald) Rumsfeld says, and I think (Deputy Defense Secretary Paul) Wolfowitz is even dirtier."

Lasseter's reporting is extremely interesting in that there is no reason to doubt its veracity, yet when you look at polls regarding Iraqi optimism about their future or U.S. Army re-enlistment rates showing that soldiers believe in what they're doing, it can only make one question whether the reporter has an agenda and seeks out controversial opinions and reports them as universal truths.

Sure, we need someone to counter happy talk from the Government, but a little balance is in order when reporting appears in the news section and not the editorial section.

Zarq linked to a Bush-bashing surveillance related article by Bruce Schneier who writes a blog which is titled, "A weblog covering security and security technology." You would think then that this person would be somewhat of an expert in the matter at hand.

Like most articles I've read against Bush's assumed powers, there's a lot of platitudes about violating the constitution, scare tactics about law-abiding citizens being targted, etc. but little in the way of legal argument. In fact, it is the total lack of scholarship and hyerbole that undermines the seriousness of the piece.

First of all, Schneier claimes that, "The New York Times exposed the most significant violation of federal surveillance law in the post-Watergate era. President Bush secretly authorized the National Security Agency to engage in domestic spying, wiretapping thousands of Americans and bypassing the legal procedures regulating this activity."

Actually what the article claimed was that 500 people are monitored at any given time but that the number "may have reached into the thousands" as names are dropped and added to the list. Notice that Schneier confidently proclaims "thousands of Americans", while the Times spoke about "Americans and others inside the United States" without clarifying what percentage of those persons were actually citizens, resident aliens, etc.

Secondly, Schneier adds the following:

Yoo then says: "The terrorist incidents of September 11, 2001, were surely far graver a threat to the national security of the United States than the 1998 attacks. ... The President's power to respond militarily to the later attacks must be correspondingly broader."

This is novel reasoning. It's as if the police would have greater powers when investigating a murder than a burglary.

My first thought was that I would think the police DO have greater powers when investigating a murder - that just seems like common sense to me. I couldn't find anything easily about policing powers within the U.S., perhaps because our policing structure is so complicated. I did find the following from Canada's Department of Justice:

Law enforcement and national security agencies conduct investigations with the aid of certain techniques, one of which is lawful access.

For the police, this involves the lawful interception of communications and the lawful search and seizure of information, including computer data. Lawful access is a specialized tool used to investigate serious crimes, such as drug trafficking, money laundering, smuggling, child pornography, and murder.

So there ARE civilized places in the world where the police are granted stronger powers for serious crimes.

I'm too tired to write anymore, so you'll have to trust me when I say that I saw a similar item relating to police powers in the U.K.

I am still waiting to read a level-headed, factual critique of the Bush policy.

I am what one might call a fan, but not an idolizer of Woody Allen. His new movie Match Point is out, and it's got A.O. Scott of the NY Times saying nice things:

In "Match Point," his most satisfying film in more than a decade, the director once again brings the bad news, delivering it with a light, sure touch. This is a Champagne cocktail laced with strychnine. You would have to go back to the heady, amoral heyday of Ernst Lubitsch or Billy Wilder to find cynicism so deftly turned into superior entertainment.

Now to be honest, even though we were born within a month of each other and both graduated from Ivy League schools, I don't really understand what Mr. Scott is referring to, but it seems like he enjoyed the film. All those familiar with Ernst Lubitsch's work, raise their hand! I think I've heard of Billy Wilder at least.

Anyway, the film stars Jonathan Rhys-Meyers as a former tennis pro with Scarlett Johansson as an American actress. Now, I guess it's not much of a strecth for an actress to play an actress, but since we're talking about the hottest Jewish actress of this nascent century, I am less inclined to care. A.O. Scott continues...

Mr. Rhys-Meyers has an unusual ability to keep the audience guessing, to draw us into sympathetic concord even as we're trying to figure him out. Is he a cipher or a sociopath? A careful social climber or a reckless rake? The first clue that he may be something other than a mild, well-mannered sidekick comes when Chris meets Tom's fiancée, an American actress named Nola Rice (Scarlett Johansson), in a scene that raises the movie's temperature from a polite simmer to a full sexual boil.

----------

“Men think I may be something special,” she tells him, in one of their first flirtatious conversations.

“Well, are you?”

“No one has ever asked for their money back.”

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By the way, Roger Ebert also liked it, and he's the only critic who's opinion counts as far as I'm concerned.


“Match Point" has a good chance, I suspect, of being his biggest box office success since "Annie Hall" and "Hannah and Her Sisters."



Opening in New York and L.A., you lucky devils.

By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution
and the laws of the United States, including sections 302 and 303 of the
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 ("Act") (50 U.S.C.  1801,
et seq.), as amended by Public Law 103- 359, and in order to provide for
the authorization of physical searches for foreign intelligence purposes
as set forth in the Act, it is hereby ordered as follows:

       Section 1.  Pursuant to section 302(a)(1) of the Act, the
Attorney General is authorized to approve physical searches, without a
court order, to acquire foreign intelligence information for periods of
up to one year, if the Attorney General makes the certifications
required by that section.

Thanks, Bill Clinton!

Great character actor, Vincent Schaivelli, famous for his role as a subway ghost in the movie Ghost, has passed away at age 57.  You may want to start looking up from your paper while riding the E train late at night.

Pusruant to previous threads about the various branches of Judaism and prosyletizing, I guess the Reform movement really wasn't kidding. This ad was in today's paper. Nice touch placing it on Christmas Day.

Can they be any more obnoxious?

Pasadena Mall Displays XMas Tree, Bans Menorah

Paseo Colorado, the open-air mall in Pasadena, has become the latest battlefield in the nation's culture wars, though this time, it's Jews -- not conservative Christians -- who are crying foul.

To the disappointment of local Jews, the management of Paseo Colorado is banishing an annual Hanukkah menorah display, saying religious symbols are not appropriate at the shopping center, the Pasadena Star-News reported Thursday.

But Paseo will continue to feature its towering Christmas tree, which the management says is not a religious symbol, according to the newspaper.

The mall has displayed the 13-foot-tall menorah for the past three years.

No more Hanukkah menorahs!!!! Everrrrrrr!!!!!!!

Happy Holidays!

Pasadena Mall Displays XMas Tree, Bans Menorah

Paseo Colorado, the open-air mall in Pasadena, has become the latest battlefield in the nation's culture wars, though this time, it's Jews -- not conservative Christians -- who are crying foul.

To the disappointment of local Jews, the management of Paseo Colorado is banishing an annual Hanukkah menorah display, saying religious symbols are not appropriate at the shopping center, the Pasadena Star-News reported Thursday.

But Paseo will continue to feature its towering Christmas tree, which the management says is not a religious symbol, according to the newspaper.

The mall has displayed the 13-foot-tall menorah for the past three years.

No more Hanukkah menorahs!!!! Everrrrrrr!!!!!!!

Happy Holidays!

I haven't done a good fisking in a long time. This anti-Bush tirade by former Senator Gary Hart is defintiely worth the time and effort. I will excerpt the parts I find objectionable below. More proof that Democrats and their leaders just aren't to be taken seriously. I am still waiting for an analysis that is heavier on facts than on emotional outbursts.

Intelligence abuse déjà vu

The Senate had impaneled the committee because of increasing reports of abuse of authority by the country's myriad intelligence agencies under the Nixon administration as well as previous administrations.

"As well as previous administrations"? What the hell is that? It must be in the Democrat style manual that one should never put a bad word like "abuse" and "Johnson" or "Kennedy" in the same sentence.

In some cases, the intelligence services even turned violent. The CIA, for instance, conducted the infamous Phoenix program that resulted in the systematic assassination of thousands of Vietnamese villagers accused of collaborating with the Viet Cong. This was the 1970s version of Abu Ghraib.

Wow. Do I even have to even explain how these are not similar? Thousands of governement approved extrajudicial assassinations versus a handful of prisoners that were abused by rogue prison guards? And don't even give me any of that "Rumsfeld atmosphere" crap because 99.9% of our military prison guards have not seen it fit to violently abuse their charges.

Our committee's work resulted in many reforms. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 required special intelligence courts to approve national security wiretaps. The Bush administration, however, has found that statute inconvenient and, predictably, has ignored it.

And the Clinton administration. And the Carter administration. When we were not at war.

Again to support the CIA, our panel laid the groundwork for the 1982 Intelligence Identities Protection Act that prevented identification of CIA operatives. This was the act that now appears to have been violated by at least half of the Bush White House in its demented efforts to punish Ambassador Joe Wilson by "outing" his undercover wife.

A prolonged investigation by a special prosecutor which led to exactly zero indictments for illegally "outing" someone isn't enough to prevent the claim that "half of the White House" was involved in a said "demented" scheme. Um, can you say...slander? And for the last time, she was NOT undercover.

If there was one lesson all of us who served on the Church Committee learned, it was that there are no secrets, that everything comes out and that the sacrifice of liberty is almost never justified by improved security.

Why the use of the modifier "almost" Senator? Is it so impossible to believe that the extremely limited "troublesome" surveillance that took place falls into that category when we're fighting an enemy that we know works inside our own borders, wears no uniforms and needs very few people to kill thousands of your fellow citizens? I'd like to know what exceptions he thinks there are.

It must finally understand that our security cannot be ensured by sacrifice of our own liberties.

The Patriot Act and other presidential directives are meant to provide additional paths for the gathering of intelligence, NOT to restrict anyone's liberties. There's a difference. An analogy (bad perhaps) - giving highway cops radar guns does not take away our liberties - it helps the police to determine if people are breaking the law.

All of these wonderful reforms that Senator Hart worked on took place before the actions of a few dozen men could be a real threat to national security, and before the invention of laptop computers, cell phones, satellite phones, portable phones, e-mail, etc. Congress should be coming up with novel ways to improve our intelligence gathering, not fossilizing reforms from a different era.

The Church Committee that the Senator took part in, did an amazing job in detailing and categorizing abuses that seem absolutely incredible by today's standards. Comentary on the specific policies that he finds offensive, backed up with examples, would have been much more meaningful than painting the Bush administration with such a broad brush. Reading the Church report, Bush still appears like a saint in comparison to his predecessors.

If the guys over at B&H Photo (otherwise known as Beards and Hats), can say Merry Christmas, so can you!

A Christmas Mitzvah

The salesman listened to this story, then said he’d see what he could do. He went back to his computer and rechecked the inventory. Sure enough, he found a discounted MP3 player he had overlooked, and even marked it down a notch to $50.

“Take it to the checkout,” he directed my grateful wife. “And Merry Christmas.”

Via Powerline.

From Bloomberg News:

One of the lawmakers who was briefed on the surveillance program, Senator Jay Rockefeller, the senior Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, yesterday released a copy of a July 17, 2003, handwritten letter to Vice President Richard Cheney, expressing ``concerns'' after he was first briefed about the program that day. ``Clearly, the activities we discussed raise profound oversight issues,'' Rockefeller, a West Virginia lawmaker, wrote in the letter. ``I simply cannot satisfy lingering concerns raised by the briefing we received.''

--------------------

From the Washington Times:

If Mr. Rockefeller had these concerns, Mr. Roberts (Chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence- Senator Pat Roberts) said, he could have raised them with him or other members of Congress who had been briefed on the program. "I have no recollection of Senator Rockefeller objecting to the program at the many briefings he and I attended together," Mr. Roberts said. "In fact, it is my recollection that on many occasions Senator Rockefeller expressed to the vice president his vocal support for the program," most recently, "two weeks ago."

Jay Rockefeller was right in the first place - this is just not that important an issue that everyone has to go around screaming like Chicken Little. It the new practices did indeed represent a whiff of fascism from the White House, he should have done more than scribble a vague CYA memo to Cheney and then present it two and a half years later as some kind of proof that he's a great fighter for civil liberties.

The Jerusalem Post asks it's readers, "Is there no limit to the abuse we as a nation will tolerate in the name of open-mindedness?"

Israeli Arab MK (Member of the Knesset/Parliament) Azmi Bishara told a group of students in Lebanon last week that Israel's founding is the greatest act of thievery in the 20th century.

"I will never recognize Zionism, even if all other Arabs do," he said. "I will never concede Palestine. The battle is still long."

Bishara spoke about the "1.2 million Palestinians living in Israel," who he said "are like all other Arabs, but with Israeli citizenship forced upon them…We are the original residents of Palestine, not those who came from Poland and Russia."

The Israeli Knesset member then addressed the Jews of Israel, saying, "Return Palestine to us and take your democracy with you. We Arabs are not interested in it."

Speaking truth to power, or treason? To me, if you believe Israel has the right to exist, you have to send the guy packing. What he's saying is not that much different that what the President of Iran says when he declares that the Jews should move to Alaska.

"I propose a budget amendment to the State of Israel to pay for a one-way ticket to Alaska for all Jews! I wish I would have thought of that first. Damn."

After seeing about half a dozen links to this video on the 'net, I finally gave in and watched it. I haven't watched a complete episode of Saturday Night Live since sometime in the last century, but if the quality today is anything like this, I have to start watching again.

The Chronic - les of Narnia Rap

Andy Borowitz reports on a misguided effort to appease critics on U.S. war policy.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice today acknowledged that the United States often flies terror suspects to foreign countries to be interrogated by means not allowed in the U.S., but said that the government was instituting a new program by which the suspects would receive frequent flier miles for their journeys.

Insiders say that the government’s new Terror Rewards™ program may be intended to make the practice of rendering – by which suspects are shuttled from country to country for the purpose of interrogation and torture – more palatable to the international community.......

He said that due to the volume of former terror suspects calling the customer service helpline to redeem their awards, the wait time is often “interminable.”

“I was put on hold for over forty-five minutes yesterday,” Mr. Hawass said. “Talk about torture.”

Ouch.

From Israellycool, Bill Clinton finds new ways to embarrass himself publicly. After watching this, I really feel his pain.

Click here to see former US President Bill Clinton singing Imagine with 16-year-old Israeli-Swiss singer Liel.

The former leader of the most powerful nation on Earth, singing (badly) John Lennon's "Imagine" in front of a worldwide audience. "Imagine there's no countries...".

Sounds like the Iranian president's credo...Imagine there's no (Jewish/Infidel) countries, it isn't hard to doooo....

It is inexcusable for the United States Senate to let this Patriot Act expire....

It (leaking NSA operations) is a shameful act by somebody who has got secrets of the United States government and feels like they need to disclose them publicly....

Straight talk like that leads directly to this....

President's Approval Rating Rebounds

Bush's overall approval rating rose to 47 percent, up from 39 percent in early November....A clear majority, 56 percent, said they approve of the way Bush is handling the fight against terrorism...A majority now believes the war has contributed positively to the long-term security of the country....Sixty percent said the United States is making significant progress in restoring civil order in Iraq, a 26 percentage-point increase since November, and 65 percent said the United States is making significant progress in establishing a democratic government there. Almost three in four (71 percent) said last week's election brought the country closer to the day when U.S. forces can be withdrawn.

Now consider that this poll was taken before last night's speech and today's press conference, I wouldn't be surprised to see the numbers jump even more.

Iran was already scary place, but there was hope in recent years that the moderates would slowly take over.

Not Anymore. Iran's President Bans Western Music

Hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has banned Western music from Iran's radio and TV stations, reviving one of the harshest cultural decrees from the early days of 1979 Islamic Revolution...The official IRAN Persian daily reported Monday that Ahmadinejad, as head of Iran's Supreme Cultural Revolutionary Council, ordered the enactment of an October ruling by the council to ban Western music.

Forget about what he thinks he wants to do to us or the Israelis, it's the people of Iran who are suffereing. Look he's giving us the finger, just like the old man in the picture did 25 years ago. Dear G-d, Lord of the Universe, please do not let liberals stand in the way of whichever individual or country decides to take him out first. Someone's going to have to do better than this.

Don't worry liberal American media, just turn up the "Hung Up" single from Madonna's new album on your U2 special edition iPod. That way you can ignore the screams of your colleagues in Iran and still send frown beams to the Iranian president. Mmmm, mmm, love that Abba sample.....

Much has been said about the "War on Christmas". Whatever your stance, I hope everyone agrees that the following is ridiculous and a potential insult to Christians...I wish I had my camera.

I went to my favorite store this afternoon, Central Market in Plano, to do some food shopping. As you walk in, there's a sign that festively proclaims "8 MORE DAYS TO THE HOLIDAY"! "The Holiday?!?" It's called Christmas! Say "Happy Holidays" or "Whatever you do, this Bud's for you", but using "The Holiday" in place of what is obviously Christmas is horrible. First of all, it's obviously a made up, corporate sentiment - not something that any thinking human being would say to another. "Hey, Tony....Only 8 more days to The Holiday, bought all the presents yet?"

If I were Christian, I'd also be insulted that my holiday (you know the one celebrated by 90% of Central Market's customers) is on par with Voldemort in the pantheon of things so evil that it is not to be named.

The Union for Reform Judaism, representing the largest branch of Judaism in the United States, has voted to officially have a critical, anti-war stance and has written President Bush telling him so.

First of all, I don't think any organization pretending to represent a religious organization of Jews has any place making political decisions on behalf of it's dues-paying members. This is what the AJC, ADL, AIPAC and a whole host of other organizations are for.

Secondly, the fact that the URJ's letter to the President states that "no one would claim that Reform Jews across the country are of one view regarding the war (or, frankly, anything else!)", just proves that the egos of the movement's leadership are the driving force in Reform Judaism.

What makes me laugh about all this is that the URJ claims they need to, "...fulfill the responsibility of our prophetic tradition (by) addressing the great moral issues of our day." (So now Rabbi Yoffie is a prophet!) It goes on to criticize the entire war effort, how it was planned, how it is paid for, how it makes people worry. Of course, these are not moral issues, but politics. How can they pretend to be the moral compass of Reform Judaism without addressing the butcher, Saddam Hussein and the fact that tens of millions of his subjects are now free and live in a democracy? How do they not address the fact that we removed a government that sent missles into the heart of Tel Aviv, paid the families of Palestinian suicide bombers and haboured Jew-killers? I don't care if you're anti-war, but don't tell me this is not at least part of the moral equation - especially for a Jewish organization!

On top of all that, the first moral problem the URJ condemns in it's letter is the President's "lack of transparency". This during the same week that we read in the Torah that Jacob tricked his father into giving him Esau's blessing. Hey, according to my bible, lying is OK as long as it serves a larger purpose or G-d's will. Did G-d lie when he sent Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, knowing that in the end it wouldn't happen? Was that OK? How about a d'var torah on that Rabbi Yoffie?

If the leadership of the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism (USCJ) ever served up this kind of crap, I would stop attending my synagogue and paying dues right now until they de-affiliated.

Rabbi Marc Gellman chimes in against his own movement which is how I came to find this in the first place.

Rudy Giuliani - "How quickly we forget."

I am hoping that the Senators who voted to block the Patriot Act revision are doing it just to score political points and that after further debate it will be reinstated. Given the additional tweaking the bill went under to address privacy concerns, I really don't know what they were thinking.

Honestly, I feel sick to my stomach that the NY Times put's it's own interest against the safety of all Americans. Aside from the fact that the "domestic spying" that was done may not have been illegal at all, the questionable timing of the article seems times to have affected the vote on the Patriot Act.

In yesterday's debate, several senators said the New York Times article showed that congressional and judicial curbs are needed on executive branch powers. Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) said he had been unsure Thursday night how he would vote but decided to back the filibuster after reading the Times article. Democratic Whip Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) said seven other Democrats had not been entirely sure how they would vote until
they saw the news account.

So, a report based on unnamed sources from the publisher of Jayson Blair, Judith Miller, et al. is enough for Democrats to determine our national security policy. Great. I wonder if the Times gives them free subscriptions to Times Select?

I'll make a deal with the Times and others of its ilk. If you think the Bush administration is doing something illegal or immoral and it relates to National Security - tell the Senate - right away of you want to, but don't tell everyone in the frickin' world. That to me is immorality of the highest order. Anytihng for a buck.

-------------------------------------

I've been looking the last couple of days for a photo from 9/11 that gives a good idea of where I was. My office was on the right side of the building with the red umbrella, at the height of the cap of the umbrella, on the side facing the Twin Towers. Of course a picture can't convey the feeling of shock and the boom of the explosion. It was at about this moment that we all dropped everything and evacuated the building. I'm still looking for a good icon to use for my 9/11 posts.

Leadership is a process by which a person influences others to accomplish an objective and directs the organization in a way that makes it more cohesive and coherent.
---------------------------------
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said yesterday that Democrats should not seek a unified position on an exit strategy in Iraq, calling the war a matter of individual conscience and saying differing positions within the caucus are a source of strength for the party.

"There is no one Democratic voice . . . and there is no one Democratic position," Pelosi said in an interview with Washington Post reporters and editors.

The U.S. is at war and this is the party that wants to provide us with our next Commander-In-Chief? You know, Leader of the Free World and all that? Why would anyone take them seriously?

The Brother-In-Law points out a very useful document describing, in detail, the access of the President and Congress to intelligence data. As he notes, the President has claimed several times that Congress has "access to" or "saw" the same intelligence on Iraqi WMDs before the war.

These are of course different words with very different meanings, so I'm curious to know which is the actual truth.

First of all, after reading the above-mentioned document, it appears that Congress has access to all "finished" intelligence. Regarding access to "raw" intelligence, source information and other data usually reserved for the Executive Branch, "it is noteworthy that Congress occasionally has sought and obtained such intelligence information from the executive branch."

What the real question is here is whether Congresspersons used the same or equivalent intelligence as the President did, not whether they had access to it or not. As the Robb-Silberman commission found, the summary information such as Presidential Daily Briefings (PDBs) and Senior Executive Intelligence Brief (SEIB) that Congress did not have access to were actually more alarmist and less nuanced than what Congress received. In other words, what Congress saw should have caused them to ask more questions about the intelligence, not less. Finally, as the Washington Post reported last year, "The lawmakers are partly to blame for their ignorance. Congress was entitled to view the 92-page National Intelligence Estimate about Iraq before the October 2002 vote. But . . . no more than six senators and a handful of House members read beyond
the five-page executive summary."

Factcheck.org, as usual, does a better job than Knight-Ridder (linked to above) and debunks the myth that the Congress did not have sufficient information to question Bush's decision to go to war. Major sections quoted below:

The intelligence to which Bush refers is contained in a top-secret document that was made available to all members of Congress in October 2002, days before the House and Senate
voted to authorize Bush to use force in Iraq. This so-called National Intelligence Estimate was supposed to be the combined US intelligence community's "most authoritative written judgment concerning a specific national security issue," according to the Senate Intelligence
Committee. The report was titled "Iraq's Continuing Programs for Weapons of Mass Destruction....."

On the matter of the tubes, however, the report noted that there was some dissent within the intelligence community. Members of Congress could have read on page 6 of the report that the Department of Energy "assesses that the tubes are probably not" part of a nuclear program.

Some news reports have said this caveat was "buried" deeply in the 92-page report, but this is not so. The "Key Judgments" section begins on page 5, and disagreements by the Department of Energy and also the State Department are noted on pages 5,6,8 and 9, in addition to a reference on page 84.

Though much has been made recently of doubts about the tubes, it should be noted that even the Department of Energy's experts believed Iraq did have an active nuclear program, despite their conclusion that the tubes were not part of it. Even the DOE doubters thought Saddam was working on a nuclear bomb.....

On one important point the National Intelligence Estimate offered little support for Bush's case for war, however. That was the likelihood that Saddam would give chemical or biological weapons to terrorists for use against the US....The report assigned "low confidence" to this finding, however.

After years of fighting, millions of dollars spent and vicious campaigning from the Left and the Right, the sounds of freedom can finally be heard from the streets of.....New York?!?



See more of today's events from FanGirl.

Howard Stern farewell rally draws thousands in NY

I bought my Sirius Staellite Radio a year ago waitng for this very moment. F*** the FCC!

We now return you to our Conservative Programming......

The most vile lie regarding President Bush's handling of Hurricane Katrina (and there's been a lot of them) has possibly fallen apart. I say possibly becuase I don't totally trust the new source and I could only find documents that would lead to this assumption but could not find the exact figures they used.

Statistics Suggest Race Not a Factor in Katrina Deaths

Statistics released by the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals suggest that fewer than half of the victims of Hurricane Katrina were black, and that whites died at the highest rate of all races in New Orleans....According to the 2000 census, whites make up 28 percent of the city's population...but constitute 36.6 percent of the storm's fatalities in the city.

Boy, talk about it being hard to please some people.

From an MSNBC/WSJ poll this morning - "Approval of Mr. Bush's handling of the economy ticked up to 38% from 34% last month....." (This may be members only, there's a similar article is here.)

Meanwhile.....Prices Drop by Largest Amount in 56 Years

The Labor Department reported Thursday that its closely watched Consumer Price Index dropped by 0.6 percent last month, the biggest monthly decline since a 0.9 percent fall in July 1949....Outside of the volatile food and energy categories, prices were up 0.2 percent, a modest gain that should help relieve fears that this year's surge in energy costs could evolve into more widespread inflation problems.

(Gee, I wonder who stokes those fears?) Could it be, oh I don't know maybe..SaTaN?!? Or is it just the media? :-)

Also, GDP for the most recent quarter was 4.3% and has averaged 4.1% for the last 2 1/2 years (Excel file). During the Clinton "boom" years of the late '90s GDP was avergaing about a 4.3% increase per year. And we all know that was built on WorldCom, Enron, an internet bubble and a bunch of other corporate lies. GDP has increased every year since President Bush has taken office in 2001.

Unemployment ? Despite devastating hurricanes that brought an entire city to a halt and devastated a region the size of England, it's humming along at a historcially healthy 5.0% with steady job growth. Since May 2003, the economy has added nearly 4.5 million new jobs. Again, this takes into account an estimate of 400,000 jobs lost from Katrina alone.

The Truth on the Ground

Depending on which poll you believe, about 60 percent of Americans think it's time to pull out of Iraq.

How is it, then, that 64 percent of U.S. military officers think we will succeed if we are allowed to continue our work? Why is there such a dramatic divergence between American public opinion and the upbeat assessment of the men and women doing the fighting?.....

It is difficult for most Americans to rationalize this optimism in the face of the horrific images and depressing stories that have come to symbolize the war in Iraq. Most of the violent news is true; the death and destruction are very real. But experienced military officers know
that the horror stories, however dramatic, do not represent the broader conditions there or the chances for future success. For every vividly portrayed suicide bombing, there are hundreds of thousands of people living quiet, if often uncertain, lives. For every depressing story of unrest and instability there is an untold story of potential and hope. The impression of Iraq as an unfathomable quagmire is false and dangerously misleading.

Swedish parliament to cut Iran ties

The Swedish parliament ceased all bilateral contacts with the Iranian parliament Tuesday, The Jerusalem Post has learned.

The move follows a letter Knesset Speaker Reuven Rivlin sent asking parliaments worldwide to express their support for Israel. The letter, which was sent to more than 80 parliaments, called for an international response to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's call in October to "wipe Israel off the map."

A poll recently conducted -- this is a British poll reported in the Washington Times -- over 80 percent of Iraqis are strongly opposed to the presence of coalition forces and about 45 percent of Iraqi population believe attacks against American troops are justified. - Rep. John Murtha (D - Pa.), November 17, 2005

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There's other evidence of the United States' increasing unpopularity: Two-thirds now oppose the presence of U.S. and coalition forces in Iraq, 14 points higher than in February 2004. Nearly six in 10 disapprove of how the United States has operated in Iraq since the war, and most ofthem disapprove strongly. And nearly half of Iraqis would like to see U.S. forces leave soon. Specifically, 26 percent of Iraqis say U.S. and other coalition forces should "leave now" and another 19 percent say they should go after the
government chosen in this week's election takes office; that adds to 45 percent. Roughly the other half says coalition forces should remain until security is restored (31 percent), until Iraqi security forces can operate independently (16 percent), or longer (5 percent). - ABC News Poll, December 13, 2005

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There's a big difference between over 80 percent strongly oppose and 67 percent oppose at any level. Even if you assume that two-thirds of those in the ABC poll that oppose us do so strongly, that's about half the number reported in the Murtha poll. That's not to mention that a majority of Iraqis are opposed to his plan to immediately redeploy (his own words).

The real point here is not to show that John Murtha was overstating the need for us to leave immediately, but simply to show that we shouldn't be making policy based on polls which can be biased either way based on any number of factors. Being in Iraq is either the right thing to
do or the wrong thing to do.

That being said, I have more confidence in the ABC Poll than in the poll Murtha referred to which was a "secret poll" by a an "Iraqi university research team".

Oy To The World - One Jew's take on the "Merry Christmas / Happy Holidays" debate. I think the author is being a little misleading when he suggests that it's Christians who are trying to eliminate "Merry Christmas" from the public sphere so as not to offend, but this opinion/humor piece still makes some good points.

I get that I live in a Christian nation. And I'm fine with it. I like
you guys. I think it's adorable that you ring giant, white pipe
cleaners around streetlights and make everything taste like peppermint
and thought the world was going to end when the calendar went to three
zeros in a row. It's like living with children.

By the way, I did get a Holiday card from the White House - I didn't even realize it didn't say Merry Christmas until a big brou-ha-ha erupted. Honestly, I did appreciate that the feelings of non-Christians were taken into account, but the holiday that started all of this is Christmas (which is a national holiday) and I don't think I would have taken it as proselytizing if it had said "Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year" or something to that effect.

Tookie Williams will be put to death shortly after midnight tonight. This is the official denial of clemency from Governor Schwarzenegger's office.

I haven't been following the case very closely, but if we're going to have a death penalty, we need to apply it in the case of people who commit multiple homicides, brag about it, and on top of it all, inspire other people to sensless violence which is what his life had been all about at the time. In any case, there is no one on this Earth who can prove a sincere repentance after they have been sentenced to death. Putting Tookie Williams to death will send a much stronger message to teens thinking of joining murderous gangs than encouraging them to read his books while he gets three hots and a cot for the rest of his life with the occasional visit from celebrities.

All that being said, it's depressing that we need to discuss these things at all. To paraphrase Golda Meir (badly), I don't hate Tookie Williams and others like him, but I do hate what they make us have to do to them.