Sense of Events

Told ya so

noreply@blogger.com (Donald Sensing) — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 18:45:00 +0000

Sister Toldjah on the topic of President Obama's habit of private meetings with select reporters:

This is becoming a regular occurrence, isn’t it? What’s happening with this WH? Are they so concerned now about MSM journalists like Jake Tapper asking them tough questions that they’ve taken to meeting “off-the-record” with liberal talking heads (and David Brooks – I know, same thing) in an effort to get “the real truth” out? Answer: Most likely. Hell, that’s why they’re pretty much boycotting Fox News at this point, and demanding that other liberals follow suit or else, because they can’t stand the heat and prefer “friendlier” news outlets, so it only stands to reason that the same rule applies here with these “off-the-record” chit chats where no one outside of the “inner circle” knows what was said. But of course, the “scratch my back, I’ll scratch your back” rule applies here. Write a favorable column, or say favorable things about the administration on either your show or a show where you’re a guest, and you’ll continue to get invited to “off-the-record” WH get togethers.

So much for “open government, accountable only to the people.”

To which Cornell Law Prof. William A. Jacobson adds,

... I'm not sure the big issue is open government.

To me, it's Obama's obsession with image. Like the girl looking in the mirror who cannot seem to get that last strand of hair in just the right place, Obama never is satisfied with his media image.

Fox News is the stray strand in Obama's otherwise perfectly coiffed media hairdo, and the more Obama obsesses over that slight imperfection, the worse he looks.

As for Sister's observation that if reporters write stories favorable to His Presidency, they'd get private time with him, I said three weeks ago that this was an integral part of the Alinskyite attack plan against FoxNews:

The other media may expect to be flattered as "real" reporters and news organizations who are actually the ones being "fair and balanced." The more a White House reporters and editors toe the White House line, the greater access they will be granted, especially to power figures such as Rahm Emmanuel, David Axelrod and, ultimately, Barack Obama himself, whom we may expect to give a one-on-one interview with the biggest suckup reporter gaining Dunn's favor. Reporters who don't fall into place will discover they are being frozen out of access and will have to rely exclusively on press briefer Robert Gibbs, which is the kiss of death to a White House reporter.

"Obama's obsession with image"? Are you kidding me? This is the Mae West presidency!

What is not forbidden is required redux

noreply@blogger.com (Donald Sensing) — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 15:28:00 +0000

Last July, I wrote in "What is not forbidden is required,"

That was how someone once described life in the old Soviet Union, a few decades ago. The state tells you what you may not do on the one hand, and what you must do on the other. Personal freedom? Fugeddaboudit. ...

The tragedy is that we are, as a nation, willingly surrendering an enormous level of our freedom to gain a little level of health care. We should remember, as Ben Franklin warned in 1775, if we give up liberty to obtain security, we will find ourselves with neither.

It stinks to be right. Now we learn that in the US House's health care bill to be voted on this weekend or next week is a section requiring every American to buy a government-approved health insurance or get fined plus jail time.

Today, Ranking Member of the House Ways and Means Committee Dave Camp (R-MI) released a letter from the non-partisan Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT) confirming that the failure to comply with the individual mandate to buy health insurance contained in the Pelosi health care bill (H.R. 3962, as amended) could land people in jail. The JCT letter makes clear that Americans who do not maintain “acceptable health insurance coverage” and who choose not to pay the bill’s new individual mandate tax (generally 2.5% of income), are subject to numerous civil and criminal penalties, including criminal fines of up to $250,000 and imprisonment of up to five years.

In response to the JCT letter, Camp said: “This is the ultimate example of the Democrats’ command-and-control style of governing – buy what we tell you or go to jail. It is outrageous and it should be stopped immediately.”

Key excerpts from the JCT letter appear below:

“H.R. 3962 provides that an individual (or a husband and wife in the case of a joint return) who does not, at any time during the taxable year, maintain acceptable health insurance coverage for himself or herself and each of his or her qualifying children is subject to an additional tax.” [page 1]

- - - - - - - - - -

“If the government determines that the taxpayer’s unpaid tax liability results from willful behavior, the following penalties could apply…” [page 2].

- - - - - - - - - -

“Criminal penalties

Prosecution is authorized under the Code for a variety of offenses. Depending on the level of the noncompliance, the following penalties could apply to an individual:

• Section 7203 – misdemeanor willful failure to pay is punishable by a fine of up to $25,000 and/or imprisonment of up to one year.

• Section 7201 – felony willful evasion is punishable by a fine of up to $250,000 and/or imprisonment of up to five years.” [page 3]

When confronted with this same issue during its consideration of a similar individual mandate tax, the Senate Finance Committee worked on a bipartisan basis to include language in its bill that shielded Americans from civil and criminal penalties. The Pelosi bill, however, contains no similar language protecting American citizens from civil and criminal tax penalties that could include a $250,000 fine and five years in jail.

“The Senate Finance Committee had the good sense to eliminate the extreme penalty of incarceration. Speaker Pelosi’s decision to leave in the jail time provision is a threat to every family who cannot afford the $15,000 premium her plan creates. Fortunately, Republicans have an alternative that will lower health insurance costs without raising taxes or cutting Medicare,” said Camp.

According to the Congressional Budget Office the lowest cost family non-group plan under the Speaker’s bill would cost $15,000 in 2016.

Hope and Change!

It's time to quote Alexis de Tocqueville again:

The sovereign extends its arms about the society as a whole; it covers its surface with a network of petty regulations—complicated, minute, and uniform—through which even the most original minds and the most vigorous souls know not how to make their way… it does not break wills; it softens them, bends them, and directs them; rarely does it force one to act, but it constantly opposes itself to one’s acting on one’s own … it does not tyrannize, it gets in the way: it curtails, it enervates, it extinguishes, it stupefies, and finally reduces each nation to being nothing more than a herd of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.

Once again:

Constitution? We don't need no stinkin' Constitution!

Political correctness was not why Hasan was retained

noreply@blogger.com (Donald Sensing) — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 14:42:00 +0000

The full-bore media and blog frenzy about the motivations of Ft Hood's shooter suspect, Maj. Nidal Hasan, is fully underway. After Ft Hood's commanding general told The Today Show that Hasan was the shooter and that Hasan shouted "Allahu akbar," "Allah is great," while firing, I posted that he was unwittingly setting the stage for Hasan's acquittal, if Hasan is ever brought to trial. The repeated media and blog pronouncements that Hasan is guilty are also potentially poisoning the potential prosecution, with reporting missing the usual words such as "alleged" shooter or "accused" killer much more frequently than normal.

But the Constitution hasn't changed. Hasan presently has only been named a suspect. He has not actually been accused or charged with anything. Like anyone else, he enjoys the rights to enter into trial, if there is a trial, with the full presumption of innocence which the government must overturn beyond reasonable doubt.

One one side of the frenzy, the commentati are clear that Army commanders turned a blind eye to Hasan's reputedly-increasing Islamic radicalism because of political correctness. For example, Jerry Pournelle:

Political correctness was the cause of the Fort Hood Massacre, and we ought not forget that. The fact that someone could go through -- at government expense -- an undergraduate education with ROTC, then medical school at a US military institution, and remain a traitor to the United States is a significant warning. A very significant warning that the idea of Political Correctness has consequences we can't afford. Corruption of the Legions is one danger the Republic cannot endure.

On the other side, commentators are running away from the idea that Islam had anything to do with the shooter's motives; Chris Matthews, for instance, saying that "we may never know" whether the shooter's religion was a factor.

Dr. Helen demands to know why Hasan was not investigated long before this week. After all, it is reported that he left a trail of anti-American statements that came to federal authorities' attention at least six months ago, although in fairness it is not certain that this Nidal Hasan was the author, his name being more common that Westerners might imagine. So, asks Helen,

Was it political correctness and concern for his Muslim heritage that kept officials from looking further into his mental health? Was the army so desperate for a psychiatrist (there is always a shortage) they didn't dare do anything?

So was alleged killer Dr. (Maj.) Nidal Hasan given a pass because the Army 's policies and commanders are so cowed by political correctness that they simply turned a blind eye to his reported, increasing Islamic radicalism?

I think there was less PC at play in continuing Hasan's career than you think. I don't mean "none," but low enough not to be a major factor. He was most likely given a pass because he was a doctor who by all accounts performed his physician duties well. And the Army is short of doctors, in some specialties critically short.

[T]here just aren’t enough military doctors to go around. So many MDs have been deployed to war zones that coverage back home — for military family members, retirees, and garrisoned troops — has been spread awfully thin.

I spoke to one Army doctor the other day - a chief of family practice at a good-sized facility. Let’s call him Dr. Jonah. He oversees about a dozen doctors, each with at least 21 patients per day.

Which sounds like a lot - until you consider that he’s got a patient base of over 18,000. Which means that diabetics or hypertensives — who should be seen at least four times annually– are only seen once a year. "There are women who haven’t gotten pap smears in years, who go without mammograms for years," Dr. Jonah says.

"The people that the government promised would take care of their health care are not getting nearly the coverage they need," he sighs.

There are Army doctors in my church, near Ft Campbell, and they've told me the Army is short. My second son wants to go to medical school after he graduates college (he's a senior now). I asked one of the Army doctors what he needed to do to get the Army to pay for it.

"First, get accepted to an accredited medical school," he answered.

"Then what?" I asked.

"That's pretty much it."

The NYT reports that Hasan tried to get released from active duty, claiming he was being harassed because he was a Muslim. "But the Army, which had paid for his education and was in great need of psychiatrists, refused, family members said."

According to the AP, Va. Tech. says that Hasan was never enrolled in ROTC there. As an honors graduate in biochemistry from the university, he had no problem getting accepted in the Army's "become a doctor on our dime" program.

The reason Hasan never came under military scrutiny for his increasingly-radicalized Islamism I think had much less to do with political correctness than with the Army Medical Department's fear of losing a doctor, who by all accounts performed his medical duties well, and not having a replacement.

There are no Medal of Honor "winners"

noreply@blogger.com (Donald Sensing) — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 14:13:00 +0000

NewsBusters reports that yesterday the man to whom President Obama gave a "shout out" and identified as a "Medal of Honor winner" was never awarded the Medal of Honor. Dr. Joe Medicine Crow "was, however, awarded the Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor, in August." In fact, it from Obama's hand that Crow received the Medal of Freedom.

Be that as it may, there is no such thing as a Medal of Honor "winner." Lotteries are won, games are won, military decorations are earned. This may not seem like a big deal to civilians, but it is to military folks. One has earned the Medal or been awarded the Medal, but one never wins it. Those who hold the Medal are recipients thereof, not winners.

When the White House wants your opinion, they'll give it to you

noreply@blogger.com (Donald Sensing) — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 00:58:00 +0000

The White House is letting it be known to Democrat political strategists and consultants that if they ever want to work in Washington again they'd better not be seen anywhere near a FoxNews Channel reporter or camera, so says Tom Elia.

One Democratic strategist said that shortly after an appearance on Fox he got a phone call from a White House official telling him not to be a guest on the show again. The call had an intimidating tone, he said.

The message was, "We better not see you on again,'' said the strategist, who spoke on condition of anonymity so as not to run afoul of the White House. An implicit suggestion, he said, was that "clients might stop using you if you continue.'

Hope and Change!

Oh, BTW, for next year's mid-term elections, "Hope and Change" is out. "Wing and a Prayer" is in.

Update: Tom Elia's source was a piece in the Chicago Tribune. But the White House is saying that the story is false.

Quote of the day

noreply@blogger.com (Donald Sensing) — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 21:58:00 +0000

When you lose your job, politicians will stroke your back and tell you how sorry they are. But when they’re about to lose theirs, everything becomes an emergency. Black & Right

Stress on Army families is great, too

noreply@blogger.com (Donald Sensing) — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 18:28:00 +0000

From "Army Live," the official blog of the US Army: "Not Wanting to Let Go"

I recently came across the above picture (which I am sure many of you have seen already) of Paige Bennethum standing in formation with her father, pleading with him not to leave. Her father, Army Reserve Staff Sgt. Brett Bennethum was preparing to leave on a year -long deployment to Iraq.
Last week I attended the Association of the United States Army (AUSA) Annual Meeting and Exposition and had the opportunity to sit in on the Military Family Forums. On the final day, the topic for the forum focused on the effects of extended deployments on Soldiers, families and especially the children.
The Army psychiatrist, Col. Kris Peterson discussed with Army Spouses and support groups the seriousness of repeated, lengthy deployments and the effects they are having on children.
For example, he noted that yearly mental health visits for children under the age of 15 have increased from 800,000 in 2003 to 1.6 million in 2008. One out of three school-age children are at risk for psychological problems and about 30 percent of children have significantly increased anxiety.
In an effort to deal with that trend and provide a central place for Army children to get mental and physical help, Peterson and other experts at Madigan developed the Military Child and Adolescent Center of Excellence in Fort Lewis, Washington.
The team consists of pediatricians, psychologists, social workers and child and adolescent psychiatrists whom are looking at the latest research and strategically planning the way forward for caring for Army children in addition to sifting through existing programs to find what actually works.
Many times when we think about the U.S. Army we tend to focus just on the Soldiers. We must remember that there are children all over the country like Paige Bennethum whose father or mother is/will be deployed overseas for months at a time. These deployments obviously have a great effect on the children and that is why the U.S. Army is working hard to create and development programs and centers that will assist families through those difficult times.
Military families, we want to hear from you. Let us know what you think can be done to assist families in times of deployments. Children; share your stories of how you deal with a loved one being deployed.

The Obama amateur hour

noreply@blogger.com (Donald Sensing) — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 17:45:00 +0000

Hot Air cites a Washington Post piece on the administration's multiple fumbles in the Israel-Palestinian peace process. Saith the Post,

Daniel Levy, a veteran Israeli peace negotiator now at the Century Foundation in Washington, summed up the administration’s efforts in recent days as “amateur night at the Apollo Theater.” He said the administration did not game out the consequences of its demands on the parties — and then flinched. “They just dug deeper and deeper their own grave,” he said. “All of this talk of negotiations doesn’t cut the mustard in the region.”

To this and the rest of the critique a commenter wrote,

But really, he inherited this mess from Bush. And it came with some “structural deficits,” which make it look even worse today than it did a year ago.

(It’s so cool that I can just copy and paste this into every Obama thread, and never be off-topic!)

Heh, how true, how true.

Not that the administration's foreign policy failures in the Middle East are any different from the rest. Recall the White House's Honduras "policy," which is that the Congress and courts of Honduras may not follow the strictures of their own national constitution to remove a president who has clearly and ambiguously disqualified himself for continued tenure in office. Calling from day one for the reinstatement of ousted would-be strongman President Manuel Zelaya, the White House and Foggy Bottom expected the Honduran government to fold under their pressure. But the Hondurans bravely stuck to their rights. Instead, writes Jennifer Rubin at Commentary,

... the Obama team picked the wrong horse, found itself in a diplomatic dead end, found a mechanism to abandon its failed gambit, and now supports elections — the very position that the Honduran interim government and the administration’s critics have been urging from the beginning. Well, in fairness, it is a display of diplomatic genius compared with Obama’s Middle East policy.

Is Ft Hood's commander setting up Hasan's acquittal?

noreply@blogger.com (Donald Sensing) — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 15:20:00 +0000

If Hasan is to stand trial, Ft Hood's commander, Lt. Gen Robert Cone, will be the prosecuting authority. He needs to shut up now to keep the charges from being thrown out. Here's why.

Bear with me while I walk this dog. Persons serving in the armed forces are subject to a unique set of federal laws known as the Uniform Code of Military Justice, UCMJ. Like any federal laws, the UCMJ is a Congressional enactment.

Under the UCMJ, service members to be tried by a military court-martial are legally charged not by a district attorney, for which there is no real military equivalent, but by the accused's commanding officer. (Military lawyers try the case on both sides, though.) Only a commander can sign the charge documents to set the ball rolling to hold a military trial, a court-martial. That means that the actual accuser of a soldier to stand trial is the soldier's commanding officer. In practice, this means that the accusing commander who signs the charges cannot be the commander who directs the court martial to be held since the UCMJ prohibits them from being the same person. Normally, therefore, an accused's immediate commander, usually a captain, signs the charges since captains cannot convene courts martial.

Felony offenses in the Army are tried by a General Court martial, so called because a GCM can be convened only by a general in the accused's chain of command. Lt. Gen. Cone is the commanding general of all Ft. Hood and is in Dr. (Maj.) Hasan's chain of command, although Cone is not the first general officer in Hasan's chain. As an Army doctor, Hasan is assigned to the Army medical Department, AMEDD, which in the Army is called a "stovepipe" command, meaning that operational command of day to day activities does not pass through Lt. Gen. Cone but administrative command, relating to AMEDD's "tenant" status on Ft. Hood, does pass through Cone.

Almost certainly Hasan's court-martial, if it come about, will be convened by Lt. Gen. Cone and members of the court's panel (jury) will be officers under Cone's command.

Here is why Lt. Gen. Cone may have already blown the prosecution. It is because of a principle in military law called Unlawful Command Influence on the trial of the accused.

In 1983 I took command of an artillery battery in 2d battalion, 3d Field Artillery Regiment, then stationed at Schloss Kaserne in the town of Butzbach, Germany. The 2/3 FAR was part off 3d Armored Division.

A legal scandal had recently been brewed by cases of convicted soldiers in the division whose cases had, as a matter of routine, worked up through the Court of Military review and the Court of Military Appeals. The division's commander, Maj. Gen. Thurman Anderson, had spoken on 10 or so occasions to groups of the division's officer and senior NCOs; part of the content of the general's remarks were held by the CMA to constitute unlawful command influence, or UCI in legal shorthand.

Justice.gov's summary of the controversy explains,

a. Major General Anderson assumed command of the Third Armored Division, headquartered in Frankfurt, Germany, on February 19, 1982. During the period from April to December 1982, General Anderson spoke at approximately ten different meetings, held at different locations
throughout his command, at which the topic of testifying on behalf of accused soldiers at courts-martial was raised. General Anderson's extemporaneous remarks were typically made in the course of lectures and discussions on a variety of topics. As the Court of Military Appeals summarized (Pet. App. 2a-3a), General Anderson "found it paradoxical for a unit commander, who had recommended that an accused be tried by a court-martial authorized to adjudge a punitive discharge, to later appear as a defense character witness at the sentencing stage of the trial, testify as to the accused's good character, and recommend that the convicted soldier be retained in the service." The court noted that "(s)ome of General Anderson's remarks were elaborated upon and possibly distorted by his subordinates. Be that as it may, his comments were later interpreted, or misinterpreted, to reflect an intent that a commander, first sergeant,
or other person from an accused's unit, should not give favorable presentencing testimony on behalf of an accused. This interpretation may have also extended to findings" at the guilt stage of courts-martial.

b. In late January or early February 1983, a military defense attorney in the course of a pretrial interview discovered that a noncommissioned officer believed that a policy existed in the Third Armored Division against servicemen offering favorable testimony at a court-martial in a defendant's behalf ... .

Ultimately, the courts afforded "some form of relief in all but 37 of the 219 cases." But convictions were not overturned because the Court held that MG Anderson's remarks were not directed toward any specific case that he had no personal interest in the outcome of any case brought before him.

But that is where Lt. Gen. Cone's remarks go "off the reservation." Cone has made public comments about the shootings at Ft Hood that directly and specifically refer to the alleged shooter, Dr. Hasan. TheHill.com reports, for example,

But Ft. Hood's base commander, Lt. Gen. Robert Cone, said Friday on NBC's "Today" show that Hasan shouted "Allahu Akbar!" before opening fire yesterday in a rampage that killed 13 and wounded 30. "Allahu Akbar!" is Arabic for "God is great!"

Does this statement, and many others like it the general has made, cross the UCI line? Lt. Gen. Cone has directly stated that Hasan is the shooter, meaning that the general has effectively pronounced Hasan guilty. But in military law as in civil criminal prosecutions, the accused enjoys presumption of innocence until the panel finds him guilty beyond reasonable doubt at trial.

Update: For clarity's sake, the law empowers the military to convene trials for offenses for which the death penalty may be sentenced. Murder is such an offense. The General Court martial must be convened specifically empowered to adjudge the death penalty and the panel does not have to adjudge it. of course, any court martial may try only offenses listed in the punitive articles of the UCMJ. The Ft Hood shootings unambiguously fall under military jurisdiction because (a) they took place on a military installation, (b) the accused is a military member and (c) so were 12 of the 13 the victims. Military law does allow for the shooter to be tried for the murder of the civilian under the UCMJ because the killing took place on a military installation.

"Friendly fire" casualties at Ft Hood?

noreply@blogger.com (Donald Sensing) — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 15:15:00 +0000

NPR's web site reports that some of the victims in the shootings at Ft Hood yesterday may have been shot by police.

A senior U.S. official told The Associated Press that investigators have not ruled out the possibility that some casualties may have been victims of "friendly fire," shot by authorities amid the mayhem and confusion at the scene.

"Investigators are analyzing that right now," Rossi said.

The post's officials have also said that the initial report that the shooter, alleged to be Maj. Nidal Hasan, was dead were based on confusion "in the heat of the incident."

Democrats being cautious on Obama agenda?

noreply@blogger.com (Donald Sensing) — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 13:32:00 +0000

That's what Bloomberg reports.

Nov. 5 (Bloomberg) -- Republican victories in the New Jersey and Virginia gubernatorial races may make some congressional Democrats more leery of backing key elements of President Barack Obama’s agenda because of the political price they could pay, analysts said.

Democrats in competitive House districts, many of them already cautious about Obama’s push to overhaul the U.S. health- care system and curb emissions blamed for global warming, might be more resistant to move ahead on the measures and face attacks from a newly energized Republican Party, the analysts said.

The Nov. 3 election results are “a real warning bell for moderate Democrats,” said Tobe Berkovitz, associate professor of communications at Boston University. “They are not going to think twice about their vote on health care. They’re going to think five times.”

Hmm... I wrote in July that the health care bill is defining the future of the Democrats.

We may get a bill of some kind, but if so it will be a greatly watered down version of the Obama plan. That won't make it better, of course, but it won't be Obama's, either. After that, he'll have not much truck with Dems in Congress, who will enjoy the freedom of running away from the White House, even to the point that in some tossup seats next year, we'll see some Dems running against Obama as much as their Republican opponents.

Well, I'll admit to error on one point: that the White House would produce a healthcare bill for the Congress to consider. Hah! There's still no legislative proposal from the Oval Office, hence no "greatly watered down version of the Obama plan" because there is no Obama plan. But I stand by the last point, that next November no few Democrat members will be distancing themselves pretty clearly from the president.

But the Republicans should take no comfort from that.

Pentagon TV report on Ft Hood shootings

noreply@blogger.com (Donald Sensing) — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 03:24:00 +0000

Here is the Pentagon Channel's first report of the shootings at Ft Hood, Texas, yesterday.

CAIR does pre-emptive damage control

noreply@blogger.com (Donald Sensing) — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 00:47:00 +0000

MSNBC's report on the mass shootings at Ft Hood, Texas, by Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan includes this nugget:

Noting the Arabic nature of the gunman’s name, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a Washington interest group, condemned “this cowardly attack in the strongest terms possible and ask that the perpetrators be punished to the full extent of the law.”

”No political or religious ideology could ever justify or excuse such wanton and indiscriminate violence,” the council said in a statement. “The attack was particularly heinous in that it targeted the all-volunteer army that protects our nation. American Muslims stand with our fellow citizens in offering both prayers for the victims and sincere condolences to the families of those killed or injured.”

Now, this statement is entirely unobjectionable and in fact commendable prima facie. It's the statement's implication that is remarkable.

CAIR is implicitly saying that it's plausible to believe that the murders have a direct connection to Islam because the murderer has an Arabic (read, "Muslim") name. As I recall, in the past CAIR either defended Islamic terrorists or pretended that such deeds done by Muslims had nothing to do with Islam.

This is pretty interesting because CAIR is a highly suspect organization.

Senator Charles Schumer (Democrat, New York) describes it as an organization "which we know has ties to terrorism."[3] Senator Dick Durbin (Democrat, Illinois) observes that CAIR is "unusual in its extreme rhetoric and its associations with groups that are suspect."[4] Steven Pomerantz, the FBI's former chief of counterterrorism, notes that "CAIR, its leaders, and its activities effectively give aid to international terrorist groups."[5] The family of John P. O'Neill, Sr., the former FBI counterterrorism chief who perished at the World Trade Center, named CAIR in a lawsuit as having "been part of the criminal conspiracy of radical Islamic terrorism"[6] responsible for the September 11 atrocities. Counterterrorism expert Steven Emerson calls it "a radical fundamentalist front group for Hamas."[7] ...

Perhaps the most obvious problem with CAIR is the fact that at least five of its employees and board members have been arrested, convicted, deported, or otherwise linked to terrorism-related charges and activities. ...

... CAIR also leapt to bin Laden's defense, denying his responsibility for the twin East African embassy bombings. CAIR's Hooper saw these explosions resulting from "misunderstandings of both sides."[57] Even after the September 11 atrocity, CAIR continued to protect bin Laden, stating only that "if [note the "if"] Osama bin Laden was behind it, we condemn him by name."[58] Not until December 2001, when bin Laden on videotape boasted of his involvement in the attack, did CAIR finally acknowledge his role.

CAIR has also consistently defended other radical Islamic terrorists. Rather than praise the conviction of the perpetrators of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, it deemed this "a travesty of justice."[59] It labeled the extradition order for suspected Hamas terrorist Mousa Abu Marzook "anti-Islamic" and "anti-American."[60] CAIR has co-sponsored Yvonne Ridley, the British convert to Islam who became a Taliban enthusiast and a denier that Al-Qaeda was involved in 9-11.[61] When four U.S. civilian contractors in Falluja were (in CAIR's words) "ambushed in their SUV's, burned, mutilated, dragged through the streets, and then hung from a bridge spanning the Euphrates River," CAIR issued a press release that condemned the mutilation of the corpses but stayed conspicuously silent on the actual killings.[62]

During the 2005 trial of Sami Al-Arian, accused of heading Palestinian Islamic Jihad in the United States, Ahmed Bedier of CAIR's Florida branch emerged as Al-Arian's effective spokesman, providing sound bytes to the media, trying to get his trial moved out of Tampa, commenting on the jury selection, and so on.[63]

More broadly, TheReligionofPeace.com website pointed out that "of the more than 3100 fatal Islamic terror attacks committed in the last four years, we have only seen CAIR specifically condemn 18."[64]

The many embedded links in this cite didn't transfer over, but this is all documented on the linked page.

Pelosi plan requires abortion payments

noreply@blogger.com (Donald Sensing) — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 22:28:00 +0000

Under the 2,000-plus page bill the Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi plans to cram down the Congress' throat to vote on Saturday is a provision that requires a monthly premium payment into the government plan specifically to pay for abortion services. The House's Republican leader, Rep. John Boehner, posted,

Health care reform should not be used as an opportunity to use federal funds to pay for elective abortions. Health reform should be an opportunity to protect human life - not end it.

Unfortunately, Speaker Pelosi’s 2,032-page government takeover of health care does just that. On line 17, p. 110, section 222 under “Abortions for which Public Funding is Allowed” the Health and Human Services Secretary is given the authority to determine when abortion is allowed under the government-run plan. The Speaker’s plan also requires that at least one insurance plan offered in the Exchange covers abortions.

What is even more alarming is that a monthly abortion premium will be charged of all enrollees in the government-run plan. It’s right there on line 16, page 96, section 213, under "Insurance Rating Rules." The premium will be paid into a U.S. Treasury account - and these federal funds will be used to pay for the abortion services.

Yes, Speaker Pelosi will indeed cram the bill down our throats. On Sept. 24 The Weekly Standard had this exchange with Pelosi.

TWS: Madam Speaker, do you support the measure to put the final House bill online for 72 hours before it's voted on at the very end?

PELOSI: Absolutely. Without question.

And today?

Speaker Nancy Pelosi's office tells THE WEEKLY STANDARD that the speaker will not allow the final language of the health care to be posted online for 72 hours before bringing the bill to a vote on the House floor, despite her September 24 statement that she was "absolutely" committed to doing so.

It's not that Pelosi lied. It's that the truth changed.

Mass murder at Fort Hood

noreply@blogger.com (Donald Sensing) — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 22:19:00 +0000

Updates added, see end

One or more shooters, identified as US Army members, opened fire with high-powered rifles at Ft Hood, Texas, at about 1:30 p.m. CST today, killing 12 persons and wounding 31.

Drudge Report headlines the story with this abominably misleading photo.

This is not a photo of the shootings in progress nor was it taken at Ft Hood nor are the three soldiers in the picture even Americans. But there's nothing on Drudge to indicate any of that. These are allied troops, probably British but possibly Canadian. This is evident from the shape and size of their helmets and the colors and patterns of their uniforms.

Update: Glenn Reynolds reports the photo is offline now, and so it is. I wish I'd taken a screen grab. But it's good they corrected their error.

One shooter was shot to death by police on the base. That there may have been another shooter is being investigated because there were reports of shots fired after this shooter was killed. It is reported that the shootings took place at two separate locations, the the Soldiers Readiness Processing Center and Howze Theater.

Other reports are that a suspect is in custody. MSNBC reports

A senior administration official told NBC News analyst Roger Cressey that the suspect who was in custody was an Army major with an Arabic-sounding name. The official said the shootings could have been a criminal matter rather than a terrorism-related attack and that there was no intelligence to suggest a plot against Fort Hood.

As of now, the lead agency for the investigation would be US Army Criminal Investigation Command, known by its historic initials of CID, because the crimes took place on Army territory. Interagency cooperation with the FBI and ATF and state law enforcement agencies is already being done. If, however, the shootings are deemed to be terrorism (perhaps an Islamist connection), by federal law the FBI is the lead agency for all terrorism investigations.

In 2003, just before the invasion of Iraq by American and allied forces, Sgt. Asan Akbar of the 101st Airborne Division's 326th Engineer Battalion threw a grenade into a tent area in Kuwait filled with 101st troops, killing one and wounding 15. He said his Muslim religion was a factor in the attack.

US officials have been concerned about Islamist infiltration of the US military for many years. See this statement of J. Michael Waller, Professor of International Communication, Institute of World Politics, before the Subcommittee on Terrorism, Technology and Homeland Security of the Senate Committee on the Judiciary six years ago: Terrorist Recruitment and Infiltration in the United States: Prisons and Military as an Operational Base.

Seem also Jihad Watch's post, "Muslim Troops' Loyalty a Delicate Question."

Update: Reports now are consistent that the shooter (or one of them) used two pistols to shoots his victims at close range, execution style, probably as many as 50 rounds. The name of the suspected shooter, killed by police, was Maj. Malik Nidal Hasan (photo at left), an Army psychologist who recently arrived at the post. There are also reports that Ft Hood's authorities are continuing to look for another shooter. ABC News reports that Hasan killed 11 and was himself the 12th person killed.

Update, 7 p.m. CST: I may have to do a bit of a climbdown with the photo on Drudge, above. The three soldiers are wielding M16-series rifles, the standard for US troops since the 1960s, which neither the Brits nor Canucks use. Also, the UK's TimesOnline publishes this photo, very similar to the Drudge photo, that it cutlines, "A file image of soldiers training at Fort Hood: America's foreign conflicts are exacting a huge toll on the base." It's highly unlikely that one of Britain's best papers would confuse its own country's troops with Americans. I can only plead that both photos are pretty small to make out fine detail, but now I'd have to say that the Drudge photo is in fact most likely of American troops and depicts a training facility at Ft Hood. However, unlike TimesOnline, Drudge did not indicate that the photo displayed had nothing to do with the events of the story, and it should have. That's a pretty basic editorial mistake for which I would have been highly dinged in my journalism school.

Blogs - you don't have to wait 24 hours to get a correction, and it won't be buried on a back page below the fold!

Update: Ft Hood's commanding general, Lt. Gen. Robert Cone, has announced that Hasan was not killed at the scene but was captured alive and is in stable condition, presumably in the post hospital. Contrary to an earlier report I cited above, Hasan did kill 12 people, all military except two, rather than eleven.

First reports had the shooter's last name spelled "Nasan," now all say "Hasan."

The Windows 7 Whopper!

noreply@blogger.com (Donald Sensing) — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 22:09:00 +0000

Sorry, you can get this only in Japan.

Have fun trying to eat it:

And they say Americans are given to excess. It sells for ¥1,450, which works out to about $16 at today's exchange rate of ¥90.65 to the dollar.

Freedom's prison-cell door is swinging shut

noreply@blogger.com (Donald Sensing) — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 16:53:00 +0000

Constitution? We don't need no stinkin' Constitution!

I wrote in 2003,

I predict that the Bush administration will be seen by freedom-wishing Americans a generation or two hence as the hinge on the cell door locking up our freedom. When my children are my age, they will not be free in any recognizably traditional American meaning of the word. I’d tell them to emigrate, but there’s nowhere left to go. I am left with nauseating near-conviction that I am a member of the last generation in the history of the world that is minimally truly free.

I concluded such because

What Bush has done is fed raw meat into the red maw of big-government activism. Big-government activism is definitionally power hungry. Big-government activism confiscates political power from the people by regulation and taxation; its appetites for both are near unlimited. Yes, I know that Bush pushed through some serious tax cuts, and I wrote on this site that unlike his predecessors, he actually cut, rather than redistributed, the tax burden. But be not deceived: NFL linemen are small when they are babies, and we see today only the infancy of Bush’s brand of big-government activism. Inevitably, its hunger will grow.

Can you say, "Henry Paulson," anyone? I thought so.

The door to freedom's prison cell closing at an ever-increasing rate. Mark Steyn documents that the radical environmentalists (as if there are any other kind) are openly saying that their goal is to control "every aspect of our life, our economy, our society." Their words, not Steyn's.

Read the whole thing. But get this:

In the name of "the environment," the state gets to regulate everything you do. The cap-and-trade bill recently passed by the U.S. House of Representatives, for example, is a bold assault on property rights: in order to sell your home—whether built in 2006 or 1772—you would have to bring it into compliance with whimsical, eternally evolving national “energy efﬁciency” standards, starting with a 50 per cent reduction in energy use by 2018. Fail to do so and it would be illegal for you to enter into a private contract with a willing buyer.

Environmentalism has become a much better vehicle to achieve a rigid regulation of people's lives than political socialism ever was. After all, the fate of the entire planet is at stake! At bottom, modern environmentalism is chiefly a political movement draped with scientific-sounding language. Environmentalists have already passed something not very different than Leninism, the desire to control the major components of the way individuals live. They are proceeding apace to Leninism's successor: Stalinism, the desire to control every aspect of the way we live.

Hi, I'm Uncle Joe and I'll be requiring you to live an environmentally-friendly lifestyle. Or else.

That's our future, minus the gulags. We hope.

I've said that before but it needs to be repeated.

Taking the plunge

noreply@blogger.com (Donald Sensing) — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 15:25:00 +0000

Google announced that its comprehensive and internet-connected maps and navigation service will be available - free! - on the new Verizon Droid. The phone doubles as a full-featured GPS that offers the usual driving directions of any GPS but also the enormous database sets of Google maps online and even street-view photos. This, my friends, is the wave of the future for navigation devices.

So what, you may well ask, was the response of the market to this news in the value of stock of Garmin and TomTom, the two premier GPS makers in the world? It wasn't pretty.

The blue line is Garmin's stock price, the red line TomTom's. Actually, TomTom looks like it might be worth getting into now. It closed Monday at 7.07, up 0.55, or +8.47 percent from Friday's close.It's YTD high is 13.33.

It's called common-sense manners

noreply@blogger.com (Donald Sensing) — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 04:25:00 +0000

Who was it that said, "Common sense really isn't very common"? Tis true. And in that regard, Bruce Buschel at the NYT's blogs offers, "100 Things Restaurant Staffers Should Never Do (Part 1)." Note to waiters and waitresses: read this, study it, learn it, do it. You'll get repeat business and bigger tips and the approval of your employer.

Obama at Dover

noreply@blogger.com (Donald Sensing) — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 23:46:00 +0000

My gut reaction to President Obama's nighttime trip to Dover was that it was a nice gesture for him to make. The Right has been hurling accusations (coff, Rush, coff) that it was a "photo-op" and purely a political move. To which I say, so what? With a president, almost everything is political or made so by the other party.

Remember when President bush flew into Baghdad to serve Thanksgiving dinner to the troopsin November 2003? The Left derided that as just a photo-op, too, to divert attention from Bush's failed Iraq war, etc,. blah blah.

Though I am crediting President Obama with sound intentions for the Dover trip, I happened upon a post of mine from 2003 about the Left's attacks against Bush for not attending any of the funerals of the service members killed carrying out his orders. I've pasted it below. I'll also say that I think there is a distinction between a president meeting the transfer cases coming off a plane at Dover AFB in the dead of night, a brief period of time, and attending an actual funeral with all the panoply that would entail.

I didn't think that Bush should attend a funeral and I don't think President Obama should, either. herewith from six years ago, links were good at the time:

We don't need a Mourner in Chief

Yes, around every silver lining there is a cloud. In the NYT's article about the Dem candidates' reactions to the president's trip to Baghdad, we read,

The trip came at a time of rising criticism of the president for not attending the funerals of the returning war dead. It also came in the same week that Mr. Bush met with families of 26 soldiers killed in Iraq, and thus appeared to be a concerted effort by the White House to deal with a political problem.

I cannot think of any reason that the president of the United States is somehow obligated to attend the funeral of a soldier killed in action. I cannot help but think that the opposition promoting the idea wants to spin his attendance (if it was ever made) into an implied admission of error and contrition. And why do I suspect that the opposition would find a way to "prep" bereaved family members about what they might want to tell reporters afterward?

Can you imagine what the other side, including no few media, would say about Bush's funeral attendance? "Bush seeks family's forgiveness," etc. etc. I sure don't recall Bill Clinton attending the funeral of any troops killed in his administration.

But the criticism also betrays something about the other side that begs attention: at bottom, everything is therapy, related to a cult of victimization and the burgeoning cult of barely surviving. Americans are not tough people who triumph over adversity and loss, but are merely those who somehow manage to endure, especially if they can be offered a prominent shoulder to cry on. Therefore, the president should be the Therapist in Chief, not the Commander in Chief. Gestures, symbols, the bitten lip, feeling the pain - these things are what the opposition (mis)takes for substance.

But I do not want a therapist for president. I don't want the president to feel my pain; I want him to take care of business. God forbid my son should fall in the line of duty after he enters active duty in the Marines next summer, but if the president shows up at the funeral, my greeting to him will be, "Who's minding the store?"

This observation also strikes me as pretty accurate:

Okey dokey. GWB flew into Baghdad shortly after a bunch of French-fried would-be mass murderers tried to shoot down what they thought was an American military plane using Soviet SAMs.

Think they might have taken a shot or two at Air Force One if they'd known? Do you think that "chicken hawk" GWB put himself in harm's way?

Do you think that any of the lefty chickenbloggers now howling at the moon about publicity stunts would have dared as much without clogging every soiled-panty cleaning emporium from here to Baghdad?

I think that one things that bothers the opposition more than most anything else is that Bush is a personally gutsy man. He is, well, manly, in the old sense of the word. It is doing that drives him, not appearing. It is results that matter to him, not process. And they don't know quite what to make of it.

Update: I see that John Cole has a summary of presidents' attendance at funerals since LBJ's adnministration (absent Ford, for some reason). It's quite rare - Johnson attended exactly two; one of them was the funeral of Maj. Gen Keith L. Ware, whom I happen to know was the only division commander killed in Vietnam. As I indicated, Clinton attended zero funerals, but he did attend a memorial service for the sailors killed in the terrorist attack on USS Cole.

Update: President Reagan also attended the memorial service at Ft Campbell, Ky., for the hundreds of 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault) soldiers killed in the crash of their Arrow Air chartered airliner in Canada while en route back home from duty in the Sinai as part of the Camp David Accords.

The danger of the Ideal Time

noreply@blogger.com (Donald Sensing) — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 19:49:00 +0000

I originally posted this on a previous blog in 2004. I am reposting it here as a companion piece (though not so originally intended) to my piece of last Wednesday on whether Barack Obama is a millenarian. Millenarianism is "the belief by a religious, social, or political group or movement in a coming major transformation of society, after which all things will be changed."

Eschatology is the theology of last things, the time when history reaches its final fulfillment. Eschatological idealism, the topic of my 2004 post, is another way of describing millenarianism, a fixation on an Ideal Time that may be achieved only if the present order is overturned.

Here's the 2004 post. I've updated internal links; other links were valid when first posted.

The ideological eschatology of the Western Left

Of the world's great religions, only three are eschatological: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Christianity sprang from Judaism and Islam claims to be the true faith of revealed religion that Judaism and Christianity corrupted.

In all three religions the establishment of the end time is the establishment of the ideal time. It is when the present world is either destroyed so that perfect world can take its place, or the present world's corruption is excised and creation is purified and restored. Usually in Jewish thought, the ideal time has been the restoration of a free, independent Israel living righteously within the Sinai covenant. Jesus' disciples persistently asked Jesus when he was going to bring it about, to which Jesus basically replied, "God only knows."

The establishment of modern Israel did not fulfill this vision fully. The dream of the original Zionists was threefold: to establish and Jewish state that was (a) politically free within its borders, (b) independent of foreign control and (c) extant over all the lands of biblical Israel. To date, Israel has never achieved all three simultaneously.

Hence, there have been 12 attempts by Jewish terrorists to destroy the Muslim al-Aqsa mosque and Dome of the Rock, which sit atop the ruins of the ancient Jewish Temple. These Jewish eschatologists believe that there is a prophetic necessity to the rebuilding of the Temple, so the Muslim edifices there must be removed. This restoration dream is shared by many American evangelical Christians.

In Islam and most strains of Christianity, the ideal time is established after judgment of the dead and the living. The Apostles Creed (dating not to the apostles but to the end of the second century) says that Jesus will "return to judge the living and the dead." In Islam, of course, judgment is the sole prerogative of Allah, but many (maybe most) Muslims believe that Jesus will be assigned the task by Allah and will judge humanity as Allah's agent. In both Christianity and Islam, the ideal time includes no sinners, who are either excluded from entering the ideal community of righteousness or are simply destroyed. In either event, it is too late to convert once the judgment has begun.

When all three eschatologies are taken to the extreme, adherents deny the goodness and value of the present world. After all, why work to increase the value, beauty or goodness of the present world and its institutions if everything that now exists will be wiped away or transmuted by God anyway?

In more moderate practice, however, the desire for an ideal time is positive. It affirms what common sense and a glance at this morning's headlines reveal: there is something seriously wrong with the present order. Hence, it can impel adherents to avoid complacency in the face of evil, to work for the improvement of the human condition so better to prepare persons to face the coming judgment. Indeed, most Christians have held through two millennia to the idea that the Kingdom of God, preached by Jesus, is just as much a present spiritual state of community as a coming physical reality. The Kingdom is within us now, although we can never achieve it fully on our own efforts. Nonetheless, we must do the best we can.

In Christian history this understanding has led on the one hand to the monastic movements that sprang up in the early Middle Ages. Monasteries were strict communities of faith, set apart from the world (although not so separatist that their leaders eschewed commerce with the world). On the other hand it led to the 20th century's liberationist theologies, which paradoxically came to eschew eschatology altogether and focused solely on the reform and even overthrow of present political orders. (It can be argued, though, that liberationism was as much a product of The Communist Manifesto as the Bible.)

But eschatology becomes evil when its adherents see only their own purity and others' sin. When they see the present state of affairs - always of others' affairs - as wholly corrupt, godless and faithless, then it is a short step to religious radicalism, what we have come to call religious fascism. Examples given: the mullahcracy of Iran and Taliban Afghanistan, the latter internally cruel to the point of murder, oppressive and ruthlessly class-ridden, a sort of real-world Animal Farm, only infinitely bloodier.

If the eschatologists are both radicalized and evangelistic rather than monastic, then the result is holy war, jihad. Holy war focuses on destroying sinners, not converting them.

That is the state of al Qaeda and a great deal of the Muslim faithful today. Al Qaeda is actively jihadist, while many millions of other Muslims are sympathetically so. They seek to attain the ideal time - the true Islamic society. Never mind that millions of other Muslims have a different understanding of what Islamic society should be. The radicalized eschatologist simply can wrote them off as apostate and make war against them as readily as against infidels.

Non-religious westerners are just as liable to eschatological fervor as religious people anywhere. Marxism is an eschatological ideology (a godless religion in its own right, really). The ideal time is when "the workers control the means of production" after the capitalists have been violently overthrown. Lee Harris explained the basic tenets of Marxism, and its fundamental flaws, in his excellent essay, "The Intellectual Origins of America-Bashing." Suffice it to say here that Marx considered revolution by the oppressed both essential and inevitable for true socialism to be established. This was a political version of Judgment Day, when the wicked capitalists would be judged and destroyed so that the pure in heart (the heavily romanticized working classes) could attain the Ideal Time.

This appealing but basically foolish ideology held power in the USSR for 70 years, abandoned long before its end by almost all the working classes themselves and most of the ruling class. Soviet communism became a shell game in which commissars and higher ranks lived large and the masses merely lived. Its Ideal Time, however, was hammered home by the propagandists as just around the corner. True Communism was always coming soon, a state in which material production was so great that all human needs were met without shortage. Greed would therefore disappear and the inherent but capitalist-suppressed natural nobility of men and women would emerge. They would be transformed into true communists - altruists who worked each day for the good of the people, not for crass, selfish profit.

But, as Soviet army officer Victor Suvorov came to realize, in a True Communist society, who would stoop to volunteer to shovel manure?

But who will be busy in the sewers? Is it possible that there will be anybody who will say, 'Yes, this is my vocation, this is my place, I am not fit for anything better?'

Of course not. Despite this basic, and indeed obvious flaw, the Soviet promise of its Ideal Time enraptured enormous numbers of Western elites who should have known better.

The old USSR has gone the way of the dodo and hardly any die-hard true believers remain in its former states. But they remain in droves in the West, convinced that Western economic-political systems remain irredeemably corrupt. Having shunned Christian faith for some decades, Western ideologues also discarded a key thing that has prevented Christian eschatologists from experimenting with Taliban-style social orders: the New Testament formally denies the possibility of the self-perfectibility of the human person. (Christian oppressions and brutalities done for other reasons were bad enough, but only rarely, and on small scales, did Christians ever attempt to enforce an Idealized community by force or coercion.)

So the philosophical and ideological origin of the modern Left: Rejecting the idea of a divinely shaped world yet to come, but believing, all evidence to the contrary, that human beings are fundamentally good, most Western ideological eschatologists found a natural fit with Marxism-Leninism: the present order must pass away, and we can build something better on our own. The violent destruction of the present order, if necessary, had a natural fit with Marxism from the beginning.

The Left, rejecting as a basic tenet of its faith the major features of Western societies, came to romanticize heavily non-Western, non-capitalist cultures, especially those of the Third World. The village society became idealized, always assumed to be populated by selfless, caring people whose spirits (never souls, which might need saving!) were uninfected by the crass materialism of capitalism. This was their Eden, the Ideal Time from humankind had sprung; Marxism-Leninism provided the framework for transforming Western societies into a New Jerusalem. Over time, and not a very long time, the Left idealized anyone who opposed the West, no matter how cruel, oppressive or personally repulsive he might be: Castro, Che, Mao, Saddam and others. And now Osama.

That such figures murdered by the thousands or millions dismayed some of the Left, to be sure. But again, Marxist theory provided a way to rationalize the deaths: building the Ideal Community might well require bloodshed, and besides, such violence and oppressive structures were understood to be mere temporary expedients en route to the Ideal Time, when the inherent goodness of human beings would finally flower and coercion would no longer be necessary.

It must be pointed out that the Left, especially the Hard Left, was always mostly from the privileged classes of Western societies. In their dreams of an Ideal Time, they always remained in power. They saw as natural allies anyone who wished to overthrow the Western order, even if (especially if?) by hard violence. They were apparently oblivious to the fact that the others never saw them as allies, not even Stalin, who had moved firmly in eastern Europe to kill or imprison the homegrown communists there before they could get the foolish idea that they would have some say in the newly established workers' paradise.

The romantic thrall much of the Left has today with Islamism is little different than its swoon over Stalin, and no more moral. The Left never had the chance to enjoy the benefits of Stalin's rule and so never really understood that he considered them "useful idiots" to be eliminated if the Soviets ever occupied their countries. Likewise today, the Left, convinced of its own moral purity, fails to understand that al Qaeda views them with contempt equal to Stalin's, and considers them nothing more than infidels to be dealt with when the time comes.

Fortunately, though, there are some of the Left (or at least of liberals) who recognize the peril (link, link, for example) and we may pray others will awaken, too.

Update: In a comment to this post, FH recommends reading "Mephisto," on Belmont Club, and I agree. Also, I recommend reading "The Ideological War Within the West," by John Fonte, whichn helps illumine these concepts. Fonte "suggests there has arisen a conflict within the democratic world between liberal democracy and transnational progressivism, between democrats and what he calls post-democrats." Well worth the time.

See also, "Six fatal shortcomings of the modern Left," by Paul Berman, an old-style Leftist, Dissent Magazine, Winter 2004.

Quote of the day

noreply@blogger.com (Donald Sensing) — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 16:45:00 +0000

"Every morning in Africa, a gazelle wakes up. It knows it must outrun the fastest lion or it will be killed. Every morning in Africa, a lion wakes up. It knows it must run faster than the slowest gazelle, or it will starve.

"It doesn't matter whether you're a lion or a gazelle--when the sun comes up, you'd better be running."

Roger Bannister, first person to run a mile in under four minutes

Barack Obama and General McClellan

noreply@blogger.com (Donald Sensing) — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 19:44:00 +0000

In 1864, Union Gen. George B. McClellan accepted the nomination of the Democrat party as its presidential candidate, running against President Abraham Lincoln. McClellan had served under Lincoln early in the war as general in chief of the Army. McClellan had also served as the commanding general of the Army of the Potomac at the same time.

Lincoln relieved McClellan of the position of general in chief of the Army in November 1861, replacing him with no one. Lincoln public reason to do this was to enable McClellan to devote his entire energies to an offensive against the South by the Army of the Potomac, which the general still commanded.

In fact, Lincoln's impatience with McClellan was growing rapidly. McClellan had already been pilloried by the Congress' Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War, some of whose members accused McClellan of actual treason for his unwillingness to fight. The general's own subordinate officers testified to the committee that they had never been given plans for any kind of offensive against Confederate forces nor had they been directed to develop any.

Gen. McClellan and staff early in the war

Finally, in late spring 1862, McClellan and army sailed from Alexandria to land on Virginia's eastern Peninsula, intending to land near Yorktown and drive for Richmond. This became known as the Peninsula Campaign and it ended in federal defeat, due largely to McClellan's incapability as a commander of a large army in the field. He persistently overestimated Southern forces' strength and capability, consistently underestimated the readiness and capability of his own forces, and most disabling, was paralyzed by doubts, leading to his most infamous flaw: he simply could not come to take important decisions nor could he be prodded to.

Finally, Lincoln fired him from field command altogether, commenting, "If General McClellan is not going to use the Army, I should like to borrow it for awhile." Because of the dearth of capable generals in the Union Army at the time, Lincoln was forced to retain McClellan as a troop trainer and army organizer, whose skills in those endeavors were hardly disputed (but those are staff skills more than command skills). After all, said Lincoln, "If he can't fight himself, he excels in making others ready to fight." Which was true.

Fate found McClellan at the head of combat formations once again, though, when Gen. Robert E. Lee and army invaded Maryland. Those events culminated in the Battle of Antietam in September 1862, still the single bloodiest day in American history. Though mostly ineptly handled by the Union generals, the battle ended in a tactical draw that blunted Lee's offensive and forced him to withdraw back to Virginia. However, McClellan simply refused to pursue Lee even though Union forces vastly outnumbered Lee's. In fact, McClellan's reserve forces, which never fought at Antietam, were larger than all Lee's army.

For not taking the chance to end the rebellion in the east, Lincoln relieved McClellan of all command responsibilities. He was never given another military assignment, partly because his presidential aspirations were becoming more obvious as 1863 progressed but mostly because resistance within the administration and Congress was too strong. Certainly Lincoln would never have selected him to lead again, especially once Generals Ulysses Grant, William T. Sherman, Phil Sheridan and others began winning victories.

In October 1863, McClellan announced he was aiming for nomination as the Democrat nominee. He did not resign his military commission until election day. However, Union soldiers voted for Lincoln by a 70-30 percent margin and because of this and other electoral weaknesses, McClellan was trounced in the electoral college.

McClellan is one of the premier "coulda been" figures of American history. He was highly intelligent and a master of important arts and sciences, especially large-scale organization, planning, task organization and training.

Yet he suffered from a gross overconfidence in his own capabilities and indeed, his own personal worth. He openly boasted in his correspondence, after arriving in Washington when Lincoln first called him to command, of the honors and compliments showered upon his by high officials, even the president.

Michael Hyatt centers McClellan in his essay,"Five Characteristics of Weak Leaders."

General McClellan had significant character flaws that I believe serve as warning signs to anyone in leadership. Ultimately, these cost him dearly: He lost Lincoln’s confidence, his job, and a run for the White House (against Lincoln). Worse, they prolonged the Civil War and cost the lives of tens of thousands of soldiers on both sides of the conflict.

Here are the five flaws I jotted down as I read the book:

Hesitating to take definitive action. McClellan was constantly preparing. According to him, the Army was never quite ready. The troops just needed a little more training. In his procrastination, he refused to engage the enemy, even when he clearly had the advantage. He could just not bring himself to launch an attack. When Lincoln finally relieved him of his duties, he famously said, “If General McClellan does not want to use the army, I would like to borrow it for a time.”
Complaining about a lack of resources. He constantly complained about the lack of available resources. He didn’t have enough men. His men weren’t paid enough. They didn’t have enough heavy artillery. And on and on he went. The truth is that, as a leader, you never have enough resources. You could always use more of one thing or another. But the successful leaders figure out how to get the job done with the resources they have.
Refusing to take responsibility. McClellan was constantly blaming everyone else for his mistakes and for his refusal to act. He even blamed the President. Every time he suffered a defeat or a setback, someone or something was to blame. He was a master finger-pointer. Great leaders don’t do this. They are accountable for the results and accept full responsibility for the outcomes.
Abusing the privileges of leadership. While his troops were struggling in almost unbearable conditions, McClellan lived in near-royal splendor. He spent almost every evening entertaining guests with elaborate dinners and parties. He insisted on the best clothes and accommodations. His lifestyle stood in distinct contrast to General Ulysses S. Grant, his eventual successor, who often traveled with only a toothbrush.
Engaging in acts of insubordination. McClellan openly and continually criticized the President, his boss. He was passive-aggressive. Even when Lincoln gave him a direct order, he found a way to avoid obeying it. In his arrogance, he always knew better than the President and had a ready excuse to rationalize his lack of follow-through.
... These same character flaws afflict many leaders today. The best safeguard is self-awareness.

Can you imagine what kind of president McClellan would have made had he won the office? Compare the five leadership failures McClellan displayed with the pattern established by the present occupant of the Oval Office:

1. Hesitating to take definitive action. This is practically the hallmark of President Obama and his administration. Nowhere is this problem more acute than for Afghanistan, but not only there. Prof. Ann Althouse points the way to the Google search page for the term, dithering obama. As I type this, there are 1,160,000 results.

2. Complaining about a lack of resources. Hard to pin this on Obama. He has complained about an awful lot, but lacking resources isn't one of them.

3. Refusing to take responsibility. Or, as Hyatt explains McClellan's flaw here, "blaming everyone else." This is almost as strong a hallmark of Obama as his inability to take a decision. At almost 10 months into his presidency, Obama is still blaming George W. Bush for all the problems. Or, as Mark Steyn puts it, "Obama makes Bush his blame czar." Problem is, no one's buying it any more. As Peggy Noonan put it, "It's His Rubble Now."

The president said last week, at a San Francisco fund-raiser, that he's busy with a "mop," "cleaning up somebody else's mess," and he doesn't enjoy "somebody sitting back and saying, 'You're not holding the mop the right way.'" Later, in New Orleans, he groused that reporters are always asking "Why haven't you solved world hunger yet?" His surrogates and aides, in appearances and talk shows, have taken to remembering, sometimes at great length, the dire straits we were in when the presidency began.

But what Obama does not seem to realize is that it's time to stop mopping.

President Obama, in office a month longer than Bush was when 9/11 hit, now owns his presidency. Does he know it? He too stands on rubble, figuratively speaking—a collapsed economy, high and growing unemployment, two wars. Everyone knows what he's standing on. You can almost see the smoke rising around him. He's got a bullhorn in his hand every day.

It's his now. He gets the credit and the blame. How do we know this? The American people are telling him. You can see it in the polls. That's what his falling poll numbers are about. "It's been almost a year, you own this. Fix it."

But for the prospects that happening, I refer you again back to point number one.

4. Abusing the privileges of leadership. "While his troops were struggling in almost unbearable conditions, McClellan lived in near-royal splendor." The royal lifestyle of American presidents didn't begin this year by any means. But let's reshape Hyatt's observation about McClellan's lifestyle versus that of his troops as a comparison of the first family's discretionary lifestyle compared to that of the American people who are coping with near-10-percent official unemployment (economists says it's actually much higher) and record home foreclosures.

First, this president, who so frequently criticizes his predecessor for about everything that you think he's got a "Blame Bush" note taped to his shaving mirror, has played as much golf in nine month in office as Bush did in that time plus two years.

Steve Tefft, writing for the Barnstable Patriot, listed a partial recap of the president's official schedule since Sept. 1, and wonder whether governing actually enter the picture anywhere, especially (again) deciding what to do in Afghanistan. Between golf, very frequent concerts on the White House lawn, appearing on David Letterman speaking at fundraisers (again far outpacing Bush at this time in his presidency) and meeting with sports figures and celebrities and playing basketball and this, you've got to wonder, "Who's minding the store?" American Thinker's Rick Moran even goes so far as to ask directly, "Is Obama lazy?" My take is not that he is lazy but that he does not stretch himself to learn this job on the job - and it's the toughest job in the world to learn OJT.

The number of commentators all around the political spectrum who have pointed out that this president seems stuck in permanent campaign mode is so long that I see no need to cite. But it’s my blog so I'll cite myself ("The Mae West Presidency").

As others have exhaustively pointed out, there is nothing at all in Obama's resume that shows he ever made highly difficult decisions that depended, at the end, on his own personal reservoir of wisdom and experience. So he does not tackle the inbox because its contents are above his competence. (One is reminded of Obama telling Rick Warren that when an unborn child gets human rights is "above my pay grade.") He tends instead to lesser matters that match his lower level of competence and gratifyingly feed the ego. And so he flies to Copenhagen to deliver a speech of no significance on a matter of no consequence. Why? Because he can do that - simply standing in front of a crowd reading eloquently from a teleprompter he can handle quite well.

5. Engaging in acts of insubordination. Well, to whom on earth could the president of the most powerful nation on earth be insubordinate? There can be only one answer if there is even an answer at all. It is the American people. Whether this is the case I will leave to your own judgement, but I strongly urge you to first to read Thomas Sowell's two-part essay, "Dismantling America," Part One and Part Two.

Nothing so epitomizes President Obama's own contempt for American values and traditions like trying to ram two bills through Congress in his first year-- each bill more than a thousand pages long-- too fast for either of them to be read, much less discussed. That he succeeded only the first time says that some people are starting to wake up. Whether enough people will wake up in time to keep America from being dismantled, piece by piece, is another question-- and the biggest question for this generation.

So is Barack Obama really a failed or failing leader? I'd say that he shares four of the five crucial leadership shortcomings of Gen. McClellan. But it depends on how you define leadership. One of the most basic ways is that leadership is getting people to do what you want them to do, even if they don't want to do it themselves. And in that regard, Obama is mostly succeeding, even if it is by accident rather than strategy.

Is Obama a milleniarian without a plan? Does he even need one?

noreply@blogger.com (Donald Sensing) — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 17:37:00 +0000

Let us consider the milleniarian world view. Wikipedia accurately defines millenarianism as, "the belief by a religious, social, or political group or movement in a coming major transformation of society, after which all things will be changed."

Milleniarianism has a long history in western thought and religion. The New Advent Catholic online encyclopedia explains that historic Christian millenaranism,

... may be set forth as follows: At the end of time Christ will return in all His splendour to gather together the just, to annihilate hostile powers, and to found a glorious kingdom on earth for the enjoyment of the highest spiritual and material blessings;

Religious apocalypticism is a flavor of millenarianism that holds that the Millennium - the "glorious kingdom on earth" of highest material and spiritual blessings - is brought about only after a time of agony and horrors. In fact, the Millennium is attained because of the horrors.

But millenarianism does not have to be either religious or apocalyptic. There are secular-political millenarists who believe that human society may be brought to flourishing by properly enlightened human institutions. For example, in 1964, the general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was Leonid Brezhnev. He promised that year that the USSR would achieve "true communism" by 1980. In Marxism-Leninism, true communism was a state in which material production was so great that all human needs were met without shortage. Greed would therefore disappear and the inherent but capitalist-suppressed natural nobility of men and women would emerge. They would be transformed into true communists - altruists who worked each day for the good of the people, not for crass, selfish profit. This was the doctrine of the "new communist man," whose fallacies were fully exposed by Viktor Suvorov. And we know how Homo sovieticus turned out.

Political milleniarians believe that society is in deep need of profound change. This change must be compelled from the top because the people are either powerless to bring it about themselves or are too complacent or uninformed to effect it. The present order is corrupt and must be vanquished. Christoph Schönborn in First Things put it this way:

Indeed, the hallmark of this criticism is that society in all its spheres (economics, culture, defense) is continually being told that it should have a “bad conscience”: not because of particular abuses and wrong attitudes, but fundamentally and universally. It is not the abusive practices of banks that are criticized, but their very existence; not this or that measure taken in the defense of a country, but the very existence of this defense. Behind this criticism, which likes to call itself “prophetic,” there lies in reality a kind of “political millenarianism” which, in the name of some future paradisal society, rejects and demonizes the existing society en bloc, demanding that it be overthrown by revolution.

Not necessarily violent revolution, a political one will do just as well, about which more shortly.

Political millenarianism is not purely secular, though. Its adherents have an unbounded (and be honest, historically unjustified) faith in government and its ability to order the lives of the people better than they can order their own lives. Political or religious millenarians are always firmly authoritarian and use the power of government to cement the control of institutions and agencies over the daily lives of the people.Millenarianism always opposes personal freedom. Whether religious or secular, millenarianists have that much in common.

They leave no room in future societies for divergent belief systems. Millennialists have a dualistic view of the present, or an “us against them” view of society. The pluralism of the modern world is rejected in favour of an envisioned perfect monistic future where there are no more political conflicts. These belief systems culminate instead in the end of history, and it is from this monistic approach to the world where the potential for totalitarianism and authoritarianism becomes manifest. “For millennial groups the political compromise necessary for societies to function is anathema, because other groups in society are either in league with evil or under its spell. There is no room for non-believer.”

Barack Obama's campaign slogan, "Hope and Change," is a perfect slogan for a political millenarian. How has that worked out? Thomas Sowell explains that the president has set about "Dismantling America."

Barack Obama has not only said that he is out to "change the United States of America," the people he has been associated with for years have expressed in words and deeds their hostility to the values, the principles and the people of this country. ...

Among the people appointed as czars by President Obama have been people who have praised enemy dictators like Mao, who have seen the public schools as places to promote sexual practices contrary to the values of most Americans, to a captive audience of children.

... Why should we assume that Barack Obama didn't know what such people were like, when he has been associating with precisely these kinds of people for decades before he reached the White House?

Nothing is more consistent with his lifelong patterns than putting such people in government-- people who reject American values, resent Americans in general and successful Americans in particular, as well as resenting America's influence in the world. ...

Nothing so epitomizes President Obama's own contempt for American values and traditions like trying to ram two bills through Congress in his first year-- each bill more than a thousand pages long-- too fast for either of them to be read, much less discussed. That he succeeded only the first time says that some people are starting to wake up. Whether enough people will wake up in time to keep America from being dismantled, piece by piece, is another question-- and the biggest question for this generation.

The main question is not what President Obama wants to do - that seems fairly clear. It is this: Does President Obama have an actual plan to get there?

Recent commentary on blogs and mainline media have tried to disern the president's plan for health care reform, Afghanistan, economic revival, jobs creation, energy policy, climate change, you name it. So far, we have been given from the White House pretty much promises to deliver sooner or later. For example, Obama the candidate promised to end the US military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy regarding service of homosexuals, a promise he reiterated this month in a speech to a Human Rights Campaign audience. Yet the speech contained nothing new..

"He repeated his promises that he's made to us before, but he did not indicate when he would accomplish these goals and we've been waiting for a while now," said [Cleve]Jones, national co-chair of a major gay-rights rally expected to draw thousands of gay and lesbian activists to the National Mall on Sunday.

Okay, one might argue that this issue is far from the most immediate on the president's docket. So let's look at the two issues that are Obama's signature domestic and foreign policy challenges:

Health care reform: No legislation has been proposed from the executive mansion. It's all been written by Democrats in the Congress. The president has drawn no line in the sand of what the bill must include. He's got a wish list, but all are negotiable (read, non-essential).

Afghanistan: The president announced on March 27,

Today, I am announcing a comprehensive, new strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan. This marks the conclusion of a careful policy review that I ordered as soon as I took office.

And that strategy turned out to be exactly what? The LA Times reported yesterday,

It's been about two months now since Gen. Stanley McChrystal submitted his Afghan war report to the Pentagon and White House, reportedly asking for something like 40,000 more U.S. troops. Monday Obama and his advisors had yet another meeting.

Or, as cartoonist Eric Allie put it--

Daily Pundit observes,

It is important that the nation is suddenly awakening to the possibility that the president has no real plan for anything whatsoever, and never did. He literally seems to be making it up as he goes along, and his strategy is to do nothing at all but procrastinate.

In the recent past, we have watched the White House and its branch offices gaze glassily past Iran, the Taliban, North Korea and Moscow in hot pursuit of their real enemy, which appears to be the dissenting media.

Economic policy, formerly the purview of rooms that at least contained Larry Summers, is now directed by a Chicago-hood playground pal named Valerie, and its focus is on the compensation levels of 200 people.

Joe Biden is the commander in chief.

The national health care bandaid will provide improved coverage for a group estimated at between 5 and 20 million people, some of whom are US citizens, at a cost of roughly an MRI machine per newly-covered patient.

Next, Charles Krauthammer, interviewed by Der Spiegel:

SPIEGEL: You famously coined the term "Reagan Doctrine" to describe Ronald Reagan's foreign policy. What is the "Obama Doctrine?"

Krauthammer: I would say his vision of the world appears to me to be so naïve that I am not even sure he's able to develop a doctrine. He has a view of the world as regulated by self-enforcing international norms, where the peace is kept by some kind of vague international consensus, something called the international community, which to me is a fiction, acting through obviously inadequate and worthless international agencies. I wouldn't elevate that kind of thinking to a doctrine because I have too much respect for the word doctrine.

So does the president actually have a plan? Well, fortunately not. But what he has been given is a series of opportunities for the government to seize increasing shares of power or outright ownership on greater shares of the American economy, aided by a Democrat majority in Congress that is more than happy to abet and a Republican opposition that starts in the center and happily compromises from there. So who needs a plan?

It might be a good idea to pay attention to a view from Britain again.

Update: Victor Davis Hanson guides a tour around the president's lala land.

The Overpopulation Myth, Part 1

noreply@blogger.com (Donald Sensing) — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 12:16:00 +0000

Myth: We can't produce enough food to feed the people in the world today, much less in years to come.

Fact: The world today produces enough food to provide every person alive with an adequate daily diet, and there is more land still available for agriculture than is being used now.

Remember Paul Ehrich's prediction in his 1968 book, The Population Bomb?

The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate...

Ehrlich’s book was influential far beyond the credentials of its author - he was a butterfly specialist (really!) - or the phony science he used. The present world view that overpopulation is a ticking time bomb threatening to end in mass death derives directly from Ehrlich’s apocalyptic fairy tale.

The planet’s population is now six billion and climbing. Across the world, people are better nourished than ever before in all history. Chronic hunger in the world today is caused by politics, not lack of food production. GlobalIssues.org lists the following causes of hunger in the world. I have asterisked (**) those that are purely or predominantly political:

** Land rights and ownership
** Diversion of land use to non-productive use
** Increasing emphasis on export-oriented agriculture
** Inefficient agricultural practices [there are also cultural, economic and educational issues with this one]
** War
** Famine
Drought
** Over-fishing
Poor crop yield
** Lack of democracy and rights

Note that famine is actually not a root cause of chronic hunger, it is just the name of local, enduring shortages of food, shortages which have antecedent causes. The result is famine; famine is not a cause. But famine's relief is not an arcane art. Shipments of food stocks from other countries to the famine area take care of the problem. But whether that humanitarian deed is done is a political decision.

Famine can also result from intentional political decision. The people of North Korea are the most enduringly malnourished people on earth. The reason is simple: North Korean communism cannot organize resources and labor to produce and distribute enough food to feed the people on the one hand, and on the other the ruling classes divert the country's resources to their own use, to arming the country and to cement their iron grip on the masses. If the people finally resort to cannibalism, well then, so be it.

The International Food Policy Institute says that even so about 20 percent of the world's population,

... are chronically undernourished ... [S]ince the mid-1970s the world has produced enough food to provide everyone with a minimally adequate diet. Hunger is one piece of a complex of interrelated social ills. It is linked intricately to global economic, political, and social power structures; modes of development and consumption; population dynamics; and social biases based on race, ethnicity, gender, and age. The world community has both the knowledge and the resources to eliminate hunger [emphasis added].

According to a report published this year by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), there are 1.4 billion hectares of land under farm production in the world today. "Some 1.6 billion hectares could be added" and most of that in Africa and South America (OECD-FAO Agricultural Outlook 2009-2018, PDF). I have read some estimates that the amount of arable land in Africa alone could feed produce enough food to feed the whole world, although as a matter of practicality, that will obviously never be the case.

The point is that the amount of arable land used today can be more than doubled. Lack of food production is not the cause of hunger today and there is no reason it should be the cause in the many years to come.

Update: There is a new twist on Ehrlichean apocalypticism that goes like this from "the world is about to end" bunch:

1. Okay, we admit that we can produce enough food for all six billion of us, plus many billions more.

2. That doesn't matter because human beings are poisonous to the earth. They produce carbon dioxide!

The worst thing that you or I can do for the planet is to have children. If they behave as the average person in the rich world does now, they will emit some 11 tonnes of CO² every year of their lives. In their turn, they are likely to have more carbon-emitting children who will make an even bigger mess. If Britain is to meet the government's target of an 80% reduction in our emissions by 2050, we need to start reversing our rising rate of population growth immediately.

That from the UK's Guardian newspaper. The piece ends,

Some scientists, the German chancellor's adviser, Hans Joachim Schellnhuber among them, say that if the cuts are not achieved, we will end up with a planet with a "carrying capacity" of just 1bn humans. If so, we need to start cutting back population now with methods that offer a humane choice – before it happens the hard way.

To which University of Wisconsin law Professor Ann Althouse responds, "Oh, great. Thanks for the warning about cutting back 'population' the hard way, Germany."

A few months ago, Dr. Freeman Dyson, one of the most respected physicists in the world, had a long essay in the New York Times Book Review in which he explained why environmentalism is now an actual religion in its own right.

There is a worldwide secular religion which we may call environmentalism, holding that we are stewards of the earth, that despoiling the planet with waste products of our luxurious living is a sin, and that the path of righteousness is to live as frugally as possible.

Mind you, in his mind this "perfect po-mo religion," as Michael Crichton once termed it, is a good thing. Dyson wasn't the first to make that claim. I took the ball and ran with it in my post, "Environmentalist religion explained."