Genesis 32:30

So Jacob named the place Peniel, for he said, "I have seen God face to face, yet my life has been preserved."

:)

Iran vs. the US

Sometimes, it's not all about Nuclear weapons. Sometimes, it's about simple humanity. As Greg says:

The Left can say what it wants about the Right's strident attitude towards gay marriage, gay adoption, civil rights and the like... but please note that being gay is not a capital offense in the United States. So root, root, root for the "insurgents" if you must, but at least be aware of for whom -- and for what -- you're rooting. You simply can't have it both ways.

This is key. I think there are many liberals who don't understand the insurgency or the GWOT. They don't get that there is more at stake than just the capture of Usama Bin Laden. The Soldiers around the world are fighting for freedom, but also for the spread of democracy and the right to live independently of such fear. Moreover, the Left doesn't understand how good they have it in America.


On the lighter side, here's another perspective on American Thought.
That's right. It's not all about Rove people. Yeah, MSM, I'm looking at you. Get over it.

It's not just a technicality

I haven't said anything about Congressman Tancredo's comments about bombing Mecca because it all just seemed so ridiculous. Plus, Rick has covered it well here and here at StonesCryOut. Yesterday, Hugh talked about it in depth and made the following comments:

I want to be very clear on this. No responsible American can endorse the idea that the U.S. is in a war with Islam. That is repugnant and wrong, and bloggers and writers and would-be bloggers and writers have to chose sides on this, especially if you are a center-right blogger. The idea that all of Islam is the problem is a fringe opinion. It cannot be welcomed into mainstream thought because it is factually wrong. If Tancredo's blunder does not offend you, then you do not understand the GWOT. Yoni Tidi is a frequent and popular guest on my program, a deeply religious Jew and a retired major from the Israeli security services. On the program tonight he condemned the idea of attacking Mecca or any other target that is "Muslim" as opposed to "terrorist-supporting." We are not in a war with devout Muslims. We are in a war with Muslims who think that their faith compels them to kill non-believers and the nations that support those extremists.

These are excellent points. Hugh has the emphases in the original and they are valid emphases. I've said before that this war is not against Islam. That's not parsing words, that's a fact. While it may be true that Islam has some inherrent problems that lead to fanaticism, it is not the fault of mainline Muslims that fanatic Muslims choose terrorism and jihad.

As a Christian, I would not want to be blamed for the Ku Klux Klan. They had issues that were there own and, in my strong belief, would not be sanctioned by the Lord. I may not believe there to be truth in the Muslim religion, but I don't call for war on all Muslims because some of their contemporaries have gone astray.


In other news, of course John Roberts has been nominated to the Supreme Court. Awesome. But, as Hugh said:

A SCOTUS nomination will sweep Congressman Tancredo's remarks from the headlines, but I hope center-right bloggers will stand up and be counted on this issue.

Consider this center-right blogger to be standing up.

What the Press said: Then & Now

The Ranger, whose recently light blog posting is in no way reflective of the amount of information he reads and retains, forwarded me some Hugh Hewitt links that detail the changing opinions of the press.

Clearly we've heard the press refer to Valerie Plame as a Covert Agent - usually in a sentence like "Cooper says Rove leaked identity of Covert Agent." Some people have wondered about whether Plame was actually in "deep cover" and thus in a position to have a leakable name.

Well, apparently, 36 "major news organizations and reporters' groups" once had the same concern. They filed an amici curiae brief in the D.C. Circuit concerning whether Miller & Cooper should have been compelled to reveal their sources.
Hugh says the following, while quote the brief itself:

The Washington Post and White House Correspondents are also signatories to the brief that notes "Plame was not given 'deep cover' required of a covert agent...She worked at a desk job at CIA headquarters, where she could be seen traveling to and from, and active at, Langley. She had been residing in Washington -- not stationed abroad-- for a number of years. As discussed below, the CIA failed to take even its usual steps to prevent publication of her name."

Hey, did you catch that - White House Correspondents! yeah, that's right, that same group that is pouding Scott McClellan this week about a Covert Agent. You know the one? Yeah, that one that was in Vanity Fair. Twice.

Hugh goes on to site pages 9-12 of the same brief:

There are sufficient facts on the public record that cast considerable doubt as to whether the CIA took the necessary 'affirmative measures' to conceal Plame's identity. Indeed, these facts establish such sloppy tradecraft that, at a minimum, the CIA was indifferent to the compromise of her identity...Did no one at Langley think that Plame's identity might be compromised if her spouse writes a nationally distributed Op-Ed piece discussing a foreign mission about a volatile political issue that focused on her subject matter expertise?...Moreover, given Novak's suggestion of CIA incompetence plus the resulting public uproar over Plame's identity being revealed , the CIA had every incentive to dissemble by claiming it was 'shocked, shocked' that leaking was going on, and thus made a routine request to the Justice Department to investigate.

So, when the press are trying to protect their own from going to jail - and maybe themselves in the future, they make fun of people being "shocked" and pooh-pooh the possibility that Plame was at all covert. But now that Rove's name comes out as a possible leak, we're back to Plame being covert and also being endangered and the whole basket of national security being compromised.

There's a large part of me that resents national security being a convenient concern for the left and the MSM. I mean, really, I would appreciate it if the MSM just came out and said something straightforward like:
"Hey, Plame wasn't covert. There was no crime, there wasn't even some kind of non-technicality, non-crime. We just want to smear Rove and send him to the dregs of unemployment and this will probably be our only chance. Thanks for listening."

I at least could support them for their honesty in that case.

Enough of this

So yeah, I'm over it now and things here will be going back to normal. It didn't even last a day.

In any event, I think the discussion of partisanship in relation to blog posting and choice of links is kind of a lame discussion. Everyone understands that one must consider one's sources when doing research. In the blogosphere, this is even more true. And extremely reasonable.

I appreciate blogs who are forthright about their positions and the fact that they have indeed chosen a side. On this blog, I've never hid the fact that I am a conservative. I think that liberal blogs needs to admit that they are liberal and not pretend to be objective. Sure, I'd like to read something objective...but it's hard to find. And when I do find it and link to it, I'm guessing someone will say it's slanted one way or anything.

And you know what, C'est la vie.


So...moving on....

Still in the clear

Whew! Again, I must state my relief at realizing that some of my sources lately have been a little...well...slanted. Because if I hadn't come to this realization, I might be swayed by an article like this, which, in its opening paragraphs, contains the following summary:

Back when Woodrow Wilson was running for president, he had a campaign song called ''Wilson, That's All.'' If only. With Joe Wilson, it's never all. He keeps coming back like a song. But in the real world there's only one scandal in this whole wretched business -- that the CIA, as part of its institutional obstruction of the administration, set up a pathetic ''fact-finding mission'' that would be considered a joke by any serious intelligence agency and compounded it by sending, at the behest of his wife, a shrill politically motivated poseur who, for the sake of 15 minutes' celebrity on the cable gabfest circuit, misled the nation about what he found.

The article then has this "analysis," if Mr. Steyn can really call it that:

As I wrote in this space a year ago, an ambassador, in Sir Henry Wootton's famous dictum, is a good man sent abroad to lie for his country; this ambassador came home to lie to his. What we have here is, in effect, the old standby plot of lame Hollywood conspiracy thrillers: rogue elements within the CIA attempting to destabilize the elected government. If the left's view of the world is now so insanely upside-down that that's the side they want to be on, good for them. But ''leaking'' the name of Wilson's wife and promoter within the CIA didn't ''endanger her life'' or ''compromise her mission.'' Au contraire, exposing the nature of this fraudulent, compromised mission might conceivably prevent the American people having their lives endangered.

But, I think that if I were really believing this writing, the paragraphs below, which put all this rigamarole in perspective, would really make me think - perhaps a little too much, about the so-called "rest of the world":
(emphasis mine)

And to those who say, "but that's why Iraq is a distraction from the war on terror," sorry, it doesn't work like that. It's not either/or; it's a string of connections: unlimited Saudi money, Westernized Islamist fanatics, supportive terrorist states, proliferating nuclear technology. One day it all comes together and there goes the neighborhood. Here's another story you may have missed this week:

''Iran will resume uranium enrichment if the European Union does not recognize its right to do so, two Iranian nuclear negotiators said in an interview published Tuesday.''

Got that? If you don't let us go nuclear, we'll go nuclear. Negotiate that, John Kerry. As with Bourgass and el-Nashar, Hossein Moussavian and Cyrus Nasseri are real Iranian negotiators, not merely the deranged war fantasies of Bush and Cheney.

The British suicide bombers and the Iranian nuke demands are genuine crises. The Valerie Plame game is a pseudo-crisis. If you want to talk about Niger or CIA reform, fine. But if you seriously think the only important aspect of a politically motivated narcissist kook's drive-thru intelligence mission to a critical part of the world is the precise sequence of events by which some White House guy came to mention the kook's wife to some reporter, then you've departed the real world and you're frolicking on the wilder shores of Planet Zongo.

What's this really about? It's not difficult. A big chunk of the American elites have decided there is no war; it's all a racket got up by Bush and Cheney. And, even if there is a war somewhere or other, wherever it is, it's not where Bush says it is. Iraq is a ''distraction'' from Afghanistan -- and, if there were no Iraq, Afghanistan would be a distraction from Niger, and Niger's a distraction from Valerie Plame's next photo shoot for Vanity Fair.

Yeah, that was close. I'm glad I'm not buying any of that. Otherwise I'd have to be worried about real things like Iran and terrorists.

Surely an error correction is in order...

I've realized that perhaps it was irresponsible of me to have 3 links in my previous post on the Plame/Wilson/Rove/Cooper/Miller story. I mean, I didn't really talk about them, I just shared the titles, just for little smiles here and there. But it was a mistake. I see that now. If I was going to have 3 links to one site in a single post, I should have chosen a different site.

So, let the word ring forth, from this point forward, I will only link to non-erroneous, non-ambiguous, non-partisan sources. [This is keeping in the vein of Mr. Joseph Wilson, who himself has always been free of error, ambiguity and partisanship.]

The only way I can see to solve this problem is by going to

All Joshua Micah Marshall, all the time. A man who, who even though he asks the question: "What else is there to say?" will surely manage to find something else to say.

Which is good, because if he doesn't say anything else, I won't have anything to post about here.

The Titles Say it all

Sean is funny and astute. To back up my claim I site these examples:

#1. Rove didn't out Plame; NYT can't let go.

#2. Plame NOT Covert Agent

and the best...

#3. MoveOn.Org Issues Press Release With Incredibly Long And Difficult To Understand Headline. Why Did They Do It? Its's Not Even Punctuated Properly--Their Space Bar Must Not Work Properly--Did They Know It Would Look Stupid? Will We Ever Know?

Yeah, that's really his title. And, he's not kidding. It's out of control.

The Leak that Mattered

Obviously the news is all about Rove and Plame and Cooper and Miller...but as leaks go...was this really such a big deal?

Powerline says no, and backs that up by comparing it to a much more devastating leak:

In all of the liberal huffing and puffing over the supposed "outing" of Valerie Plame--as though she might be in danger as she drove to and from her desk job in Langley, and as though she hadn't posed for a photo shoot in Vanity Fair, dressed up as a spy--I've seen no liberal criticism of a more recent, real outing of a clandestine CIA operation. In this case, those who outed a CIA operation exposed secret agents operating in the field, in circumstances of great personal danger, not a civilian desk employee. The outing of the CIA operation undoubtedly forced the CIA to terminate or change what had been an effective means of protecting the nation's security, and likely did endanger the lives of real covert agents.

I'm referring, of course, to the exposure of a purportedly civilian airline as a CIA operation:

While posing as a private charter outfit - "aircraft rental with pilot" is the listing in Dun and Bradstreet - Aero Contractors is in fact a major domestic hub of the Central Intelligence Agency's secret air service. The company was founded in 1979 by a legendary C.I.A. officer and chief pilot for Air America, the agency's Vietnam-era air company, and it appears to be controlled by the agency, according to former employees.
An analysis of thousands of flight records, aircraft registrations and corporate documents, as well as interviews with former C.I.A. officers and pilots, show that the agency owns at least 26 planes, 10 of them purchased since 2001. The agency has concealed its ownership behind a web of seven shell corporations that appear to have no employees and no function apart from owning the aircraft.

The planes, regularly supplemented by private charters, are operated by real companies controlled by or tied to the agency, including Aero Contractors and two Florida companies, Pegasus Technologies and Tepper Aviation.

Who was it who "outed" these CIA employees, blew their cover and perhaps endangered their lives? The New York Times, of course! In an article that was based largely on leaks by former CIA employees, who were out to embarrass the administration. Ah, but that's the "good" kind of leak--the kind that exposes the Agency's real covert operatives, not the kind that tries to correct lies told by Democratic Party loyalists in the pages of the New York Times.

It's worth reading the Powerline post from the beginning as it does contain some good fisking of a fishy New York Times Editorial. And what does John of Powerline think of Joe Wilson:

That's why our opinion of Joe Wilson is so low. He leaked the contents of his own report to the CIA--in the pages of the New York Times!--only he lied about his own report. He "peddled disinformation," falsely claiming to have found no evidence of an Iraqi effort to buy uranium from Niger, in order to "harm a political adversary," President Bush. The Times didn't mind that particular disinformation, however, since it fit the paper's political agenda.

Talk about an axe to grind. The New York Times and the Democrats in Congress have totally lost their perspective. When the CIA was leaking left and right in order to harm the Administration and the press ate it up. They would have welcomed a leak from the administration at that time.

This airline leak is much more harmful as it was obviously being used in covert operations. A claim that cannot be so easily made about Officer Plame.

Poor JPod

I think that SpiderChick and I have had conversations that resemble this John Podhoretz riff, notable for its complete lack of full-stop punctuation - which as such fully captures the essence of the moment:

WHINE
Hey, you know, I'm supposed to be on vacation and everything, out here at the beach, but there's all this news going on, and so I'm not getting to spend a lot of time relaxing, plus all you immigration people continue to write in capital letters which is annoying, and now Rhenquist has a fever and the space shuttle isn't launching and my daughter is only now getting over an ear infection but my wife has a sinus infection now and then at 6 in the morning the house alarm started going off but it's my parents' house and they're on the luxurious NR cruise around the British isles and I had to jump out of bed to deal with a faulty electrical system in the basement and to top it all off it's 62 degrees in the Hamptons on July 12...

One more on Plame

John Podhoretz has a great piece in today's New York Post: Scandal Implosion
(login: no_email_666@yahoo.com password: nopassword.)

The last two paragraphs capture what I was saying a few days ago:

What isn't controversial is this: Karl Rove didn't "out" Valerie Plame as a CIA agent to intimidate Joe Wilson. He was dismissing Joe Wilson as a low-level has-been hack to whom nobody should pay attention. He was right then, and if he said it today, he'd still be right.

And if Valerie Plame wants to live a quiet spy life, she should stop having her picture taken by society photographers and stop getting stories written about her on the front page of the Times.

And while were at it, can I just say that CNN has gone completely nuts? They just hads a picture of Rove with the headline "Worse than Watergate??"

Uhhh....are you kidding me?

The Requirements for Breaking the Law

My guess is that most people reading this have been steeped in the Valerie Plame story, but here's what you don't hear - the circumstances that must be met in order for Karl Rove to have broken the law in his conversation with report Matt Cooper (last full paragraph, which I've bolded).

Cliff May explains:

In his conversation with Matt Cooper was Karl Rove responding to Joe Wilson’s claim that Vice President Cheney sent him on the mission to Niger?

That claim was implied in Wilson’s NYT oped 7/6/03: “In February 2002, I was informed by officials at the Central Intelligence Agency that Vice President Dick Cheney’s office had questions about a particular intelligence report. … The agency officials asked if I would travel to Niger to check out the story so they could provide a response to the vice president’s office.”

But Cheney has consistently denied that he sent Wilson anywhere – or even received a report on Wilson’s visit. And the Senate Select Committee On Intelligence confirmed that Cheney did not assign Wilson to conduct an investigation on behalf of the CIA.

CIA Director George Tenet said (in a press release 7/11/03) that the “CIA’s counter-proliferation experts, on their own initiative, asked an individual with ties to the region to make a visit to see what he could learn.” Wilson’s wife was a CIA counter-proliferation expert at this time.

Did she help get him the assignment? Apparently so (emphasis added):

“Some [CIA Counterproliferation Division, or CPD,] officials could not recall how the office decided to contact the former ambassador, however, interviews and documents provided to the Committee indicate that his wife, a CPD employee, suggested his name for the trip. The CPD reports officer told Committee staff that the former ambassador’s wife ‘offered up his name’ and a memorandum to the Deputy Chief of the CPD on February 12, 2002, from the former ambassador’s wife says, ‘my husband has good relations with both the PM [prime minister] and the former Minister of Mines (not to mention lots of French contacts), both of whom could possibly shed light on this sort of activity.’” (From the Select Committee On Intelligence’s “Report On The U.S. Intelligence Community’s Prewar Intelligence Assessments On Iraq,” U.S. Senate, 7/7/04)

So that would mean Rove may have been countering Wilson’s demonstrably false claim with the truth. Is it a crime in Washington to tell the truth? Actually, it probably would be if (1) Rove knew that Mrs. Wilson had been undercover, (2) if the CIA was taking assertive measures to protect her covert status, and (3) if Rove knew about Mrs. Wilson’s status because he had access to classified information.

But if those conditions have not been met, this is a tempest in a teapot – one which will be stirred for all its worth nevertheless.

Steyn and Goldberg: Together at Last

...or something like that.

Two of my favorite columnists finally meet...at sea no less. Jonah chronicles the meet at The Corner. Now, normally I would just paste and move on, but I just have to make a few comments:

Sorry for the radio silence. Been at sea and all that. The ship is lovely, nicer than any I've been on. But the internet set-up strikes me as akin to Bulgaria in 1962. Very annoying

Yeah. I would think it would be annoying because internet in Bulgaria in 1962 would equal just about no internet. I think Al Gore was too young to have invented it way back then :)

Anyway, it's been a very nice time. The high point and low point were both that I finally got to meet Mark Steyn. The annoying thing is that he's actually a young guy-- or at least he appears that way, there may be some Dorian Gray ooga-booga at work.

Jonah, please explain to me the scientific nature of "ooga-booga."

we're in Waterford -- where they make the crystal. So I think we'll duck into town and buy a crystal baseball mit or maybe a cricket bat. Something really practical.

It's not only practical, it's time appropriate. It is after all, All-Star game day.

Which reminds me, did you know that this one counts??

UPDATE: I should have kept reading, silly me.
KLo has the very next Corner post, saying:

BULGARIAN INTERNET CONNECTIONS IN 1962 Yeah, they were the worst. And the Communists were so good about putting all the info out there. But the cable lines would go down, and...

Waterford, eh? I fully expect a crystal laptop, gavel, witch's broom. Something completely appropriate from the gang that is not in NYC in August.

I don't mind thinking like her, that's for sure. :)

The Plame Game

For a few days now I've been working on information regarding Valerie Plame and Joe Wilson. My contention, in a comment to this post, was that this Plame-Leak controversy was obscuring the fact that Wilson lied on multiple occasions about the circumstances surrounding his trip to Niger to investigate Uranium sales deals with Iraq.

Another commenter said that he never heard that Wilson had been discredited. I believe he never heard it because it isn't in the MSM's best interest to discuss that the "Bush-lied" poster boy was actually lying about quite a few things...and more so...possibly just incompetent at his job and only got the Niger mission because his wife in fact worked for the CIA.

You can read summaries of these facts in articles in National Review here and here as well as OpinionJournal.com. which concluded with the following paragraphs:

The Senate Intelligence Committee found, finally, that far from debunking the Iraq-Niger story, Mr. Wilson's debrief was interpreted as providing "some confirmation of foreign government service reporting" that Iraq had sought uranium in Niger. Why? Because he'd reported that former Nigerien Prime Minister Ibrahim Mayaki had told him of a 1999 visit by the Iraqis to discuss "commercial relations," which the leader of the one-industry country logically interpreted as interest in uranium.

Remember that Messrs. Bush and Blair only said that Iraq had "sought" or was "trying to buy" uranium, not that it had succeeded. It now appears that both leaders have been far more scrupulous in discussing this and related issues than much of the media in either of their countries, which would embarrass the journalistic profession, if that were possible.

All of this matters because Mr. Wilson's disinformation became the vanguard of a year-long assault on Mr. Bush's credibility. The political goal was to portray the President as a "liar," regardless of the facts. Now that we know those facts, Americans can decide who the real liars are.

But I am working on a summary based on the primary source documents of the Butler Report (from British Intelligence) and the Senate Intelligence Committee report.

Here is a key phrase from the Butler Report:

It is accepted by all parties that Iraqi officials visited Niger in 1999. The British Government had intelligence from several different sources indicating that this visit was for the purpose of acquiring uranium. Since uranium constitutes almost three-quarters of Niger's exports, the intelligence was credible.

It should also be noted that while at one time the US seemed to back on the President's State of the Union statement about uranium and Niger, the British never backed down and continued to maintain that Iraq sought those materials. Good for them.

Interestingly enough, on Special Report w/Brit Hume tonight(Monday) Fred Barnes said "Of course Wilson's whole story has been totally discredited now." And he said it so off-handedly as to suggest that it was common knowledge.

Well, apparently it's not, but it should be.


(Note: portions of this piece were cross-posted at Stones Cry Out*)

*Cause really...where else would it be cross posted? :)

Two Births

Great news!
One of my best friends will hopefully be a missionary in Europe with her husband within a few months - but that's not the news. Her husband called me tonight and told me that she was going into labor. So I am praying because I trust God that He will do great things through this family for the Glory of His Kingdom.

More Great News:
I just heard of a new Christian :) Over the past few years I have been working with a travel agent, Christy, from the west coast for all of my world wide travel because it was cheaper than the missionary organization with which I was working. She was great and on my lastest trip last spring found me a flight at half the usual cost - a tremendous blessing. She knew I was a Christian and why I was travelling and so I was always recommending people to her because I knew taht would mean more to her than my "Have a nice day" at the end of my email.

Well, I just sent her an inquiry about tickets for a friend of mine to work at a church camp and she wrote back saying that she just became a Christiand and so was excited to hear about stuff like that :)

Hallelujah :)

God is good!

Punctuality isn't Everything

Sometimes certain events, activities or even the day of the week prevent us from making of the most of our deserved birthday leverage on the day of our actual birthday. At such times it is more advantageous for the Birthday person to celebrate their birthday on the following day. This is the case for my friend Beverly this year. And so I say to her today:

Happy Birthday (Observed)!!



:)

Important Reminder

Hey, we're at war.

I know maybe that's not obvious to everyone, but it's true. We're not at war because it's July 7th and London has been attacked. What happened today in London is another battle in the War on Terror. It's not just an attack. It's not something new, it's the war we've been fighting for the last 4 years.

Some people in the news don't seem to understand this. Others say that these attacks have put "the war on terror back in the forefront of people's minds."

It shouldn't have left. Terror shouldn't be the number 3 issue behind poverty and the environment. If we don't successfully fight the terrorists, there's no point in worrying about anything else because we won't be able to fight over those other things.

We need to win this war so that we can go back to the days when we had the luxury of worrying about poverty and environmental issues most of all. We're at war. Today we saw all over the news what the War on Terror is about. But there are American troops all over the world who see the War on Terror every day. Denying or forgetting about this war is an affront to our brave military. It is anything but support for our troops.

The Flow of Conversation

I know sometimes The Corner is hard to follow if you read from the top down. So, because of that and because I think that we could use a little funny here today, I've extracted this exchange from The Corner:

BIRTHDAYS [K. J. Lopez]
Yesterday was George W. Bush's as well. My favorite conversation with him is one he had with someone a foot or so away from me. And it wasn't actually the conversation that I cared about. It was the greeting. "Como estas, baby?" And she didn't melt, so I had to conclude she'd heard it before.
Posted at 03:31 PM

FORKED TONGUE [John Derbyshire]
Kathryn: No offense to the recipient of the President's greeting, nor to the President himself, and least of all to you, but near the top of a list of Constitutional Amendments I favor is one that would prohibit elected officials of the U.S. govt. from publicly speaking any language other than English while in office.
Posted at 03:45 PM

¡CARAMBA! [López ]
Oh please. It was at a cocktail party and I'll contend to my dying day it was just way cool. And be a tad jealous.
Posted at 03:47 PM

ANOTHER LANGUAGE, DERB? [JPod]
What about "Ich bin ein Berliner"? What about Calvin Coolidge declaiming verses from Catullus?
Posted at 03:52 PM


RE: FORKED TONGUE [John Derbyshire]
On St. Cal's behalf, I shall rewrite my constitution to permit dead languages ONLY. Our President will then be free to greet visitors in Sanskrit, Amamaic, or Linear B.

"Ich bin ein Berliner" means "I am a jelly donut." See the pitfalls here?
Posted at 04:04 PM


~~

Whew that was more work than I thought it would be. But if you guessed that the mention of "Linear B" was my favorite part, you were right :)

London Calling

About 8 years ago I was in London on a trip. A few days before we left there was a Tube strike and at midnight one night, while I was riding on the Underground, the strike went into effect and all riders were shuttled off the train at the next available station. The streets were crowded and we were left to find our way back to Oxford street. We ended up back tracking a few times - but the whole experience became an amusing anecdote.

Not so today in London.

I can only imagine the number of people that fled out of the stations this morning and how much more chaotic it was for Londoners and tourists alike. At 7:30 this morning I called a friend of mine who works at the BBC in London. She is always late for work and so I was surprised to find her in her office. Turns out today she managed to leave for work on time and was about 3 trains ahead of one of the explosions. God was certainly watching out for her and I pray she sees that in her life. She also said that Britain shut down mobile phone service to prevent the terrorists from sending detonation signals that way. And yet, I was able to get through to her. This means that if they did want to do that, they would still be able to, as long as they conducted the calls from outside the UK. I find it interesting that they could shut down mobile service at all, let alone only in such a way as to prevent outgoing mobile phone calls...?

In these situations I find the timing and dissemination of information to be interestng. Five minutes before my friend in London was telling me all about the terrorist countermeasures, a Cleveland radio station was reporting that the Underground explosions were due to a power surge in lines. In any event, things seem to be more under control now and as Jim Geraghty reported this morning: "Londoners have always been made of uncommonly tough stuff."

Also, I agree with Mark's Stones Cry Ouy post that we should not react too quickly in terms of the stock market. It will rebound a lot sooner than we think. Some will rebound better than others and actually, from a financial perspective it will be better to find stocks now that you know will rebound well and purchase them.

But of course, I recommend praying first.


Cross-posted earlier today at Stones Cry Out

Dueling Protests

The Mudville Gazette compared and contrasted a protest in Copenhagen covered by the AP:

Just hours before Bush's arrival, hundreds of people demonstrated across Denmark, including in Copenhagen where about 200 protesters marched to the U.S. Embassy, chanting anti-American slogans and burning Danish and U.S. flags.

Greyhawk comments:
That's 200 from a city of 1.7 million. That's slightly over .01% of the population of the city, and the AP felt it was important that their opinions should be known. Which is fine.

And then he goes on to site a much larger 1500 strong protest in Mosul that was largely ignored by the AP and reported by a blog.

Additionally, a commenter to the Greyhawk post sites this article which numbers the Copenhagen demonstrators in the "thousands". However, later that same story says:

In the capital, some 200 protesters, mostly black-clad youths, marched to the US Embassy, shouting "Death to Bush, death to imperialism."

Isn't Copenhagen the capital of Denmark??
Yeah, I thought so.

And...so is it possible that the AP missed a chance to make President Bush look worse by accurately reporting the thousands of protestors in the capital.

Or Copenhagen. Whichever.

No, I think what actually happened was that the elite media outlet "China View" which printed the above article, just doesn't know European geography.

In any even, protests in already free countries shouldn't beat out Demonstrations in burgeoning democracies for the front page.

The Unpredictability of Hindsight

When President Reagan passed away last year I knew that I had a great respect for the man. But as the news coverage went on and they talked more and more about him and what he did for the country I kept thinking "Wow, he's even cooler than I thought he was."

Now it's true that Justice O'Connor has not died, only resigned, but they talk about her legacy as if she is gone. And the interesting thing is, the more I hear about her "legacy" of "moderate" rulings, the more relieved I am that she has resigned.

The Ohio GOP

Today in the mail I got a request for a donation from the Ohio Republican Party. Well I don't have the funds for this right now, and so I declined, because I know how to limit spending, unlike other Ohio politicians. But the Ohio GOP apparently has bigger problems then just being turned down for money by little ol' me. Apparently the Ohio Democratic Party HQ was broken into over the weekend:

The break-in occurs at a time when the Ohio Republican Party is threatened by one of the largest scandals to hit the state's government in decades.

Some Democrats also say the break-in is eerily similar to a burglary at the Lucas County Democratic Party Headquarters last fall, in which three computers were stolen.
...
The break-in occurred a week after the Ohio Democratic Party began airing a 30-second TV ad that links Republican office-holders with the state's failed $50 million rare-coin investment with Tom Noe.
...
Jason Mauk, a spokesman for the Ohio Republican Party, said the state GOP had nothing to do with the break-in. "I certainly hope the implication is that this was not politically motivated," Mr. Mauk said. "I can guarantee from our perspective that this is not the case." He added, "It sounds to me like Mayor [Michael] Coleman has a crime problem that they need to address."

Clearly the Toledo Blade has some kind of agenda here. While it's true that I excerpted the most blantant pieces of the article, those first two paragraphs are the 3rd and 4th paragraphs of the entire article - an article with 36 paragraphs! (Yes, I counted.) Trying to insinuate GOP involvement just for the sake of insinuation is bad, even without an impending election. It's these kind of things that make people distrust local papers when there is an impending election.

Anyway, I found this article via Right Angle Blog, one that covers all things Ohio (for anyone interested).

Also found there, a poll about what will "save Ohio." The choices are pretty interesting:
* Petro's Reorganization of State Government?
* Blackwell's Amendment to Limit State Spending?
* Montgomery's 100,000 Grants to Students who Remain in Ohio?
* Draganic's: Restructuring of the State's Budget Process?

Uh...keeping students in Ohio? What?? I admit that I don't know anything about this plan, but the idea itself seems random. People move to Ohio freely because it's a great state. In fact I just saw a woman with whom I graduated High School who told me that she moved back up here from Georgia because she liked it here better. I think paying people to stay here makes Ohio seem like the burning wasteland of unemployment that John Kerry was always implying it was during the election.

I'd have to say limiting state spending is the way to go. Let's hear it for Kenneth Blackwell!