The Art of the Blog

2/03/2005

THIS IS MY OLD SITE!

Click to go to my new site:

The Art of the Blog . com

12/30/2004

TTLB Ecosystem Ranking

I just realized that this site, the OOOOOLLLLDDDDD one which I haven't use since April, is ranked #1324 in the TTLB Ecosystem. Who the heck is still linking to this site anyway?

My new site is #3569 .

Put my two sites together and I would be at 195 inbound links . . .which would put me in the Large Mammals category, somewhere around #956 or so.

I wonder if I can get NZ Bear to add the two together . . . .

Please visit my new site, TheArtoftheBog.com for continued coverage of the world at large.
Thank you!

4/15/2004

John Kerry: Beautiful

Not beautiful in the same way as Michelle Malkin, but this bit from the Drudgereport about Kerry's wife and her refusal to dislose her tax returns is at least worthy of being called "classic."

TERESA FIGHTS TO KEEP HER TAX RETURNS PRIVATE

Besides a blurring of Heinz-Kerry assets, the campaign is also wresting with past quotes made by Kerry himself.

In his 1990 Senate race, Kerry asked his challenger to "clear the air" by releasing tax returns.

"I think people want to know whether someone they possibly might send to Washington to represent them in the Senate is someone who pays their fair share of taxes,'" Kerry said. "Why is James Rappaport hiding his tax returns?" Kerry asked. "Why is it some people can live up to that standard and he can't? It seems to me that he ought to be able to release those returns and clear the air...

"Why doesn't he just release them? What is he hiding?"

And at the height of last year's primary race, Kerry vowed that "openness" would be the "hallmark" of his administration.

"As president, openness will be the hallmark of my administration, not some talking point... The highest office in the land requires the highest level of openness for the American people."

Music in the OR

What's the big deal? They've been doing this since before I worked in an OR back in '92-'94. I seem to remember that the the liver transplant team had a penchant for AC/DC.

How'd you like to here "Highway to Hell" or "Hell's Bells" as you're going under? ;-)

Surgical Tunes: Music Strikes a Chord in the OR

"Screw Her"

This girl needs to be punished now.

Too bad they'll most likely let her off with a handslap and a "strong talkin' to."

Coed Hoaxer to Try For Plea Bargain

"She obviously is dealing with a lot of trauma related to this, she's going through a very difficult time. She's having both some emotional and some physical problems to deal with as you might expect somebody who's gone through something like this," Hopper said after appearing in court.

Yep, the old "I did this to myself but you should forget it and let me skate since I am so pitiful" technique. Sorta like the "I murdered my parents; have mercy on me because I'm an orphan" strategery.

To misquote Kos, "Screw her."

Asked about the possibility of a plea bargain, Blanchard said his office always tries to reach an agreement "if that can be done in the interest of justice and reaching a fair result. ... We'll see if that's possible with this case."

Sure it is . . . toss her in jail for a while. That's be fair.

Hundreds of people from Madison and Seiler's hometown searched for her after she disappeared, and her claim about an armed man touched off a major manhunt that authorities said cost the police about $96,000.

In addition, she should have to pay back the city its costs and pay each of the searchers minimum wage for each hour they searched. Maybe she should pay the businesses that lost man-hours to the search for their lost productivity, too.

Coulter on Commissions and Air Travel

Ann Coulter tones it down, mostly, in this latest piece.

She skewers 9-11 commission member Jamie Gorelick for "building a wall" between intelligence and law enforcement in 1995 and CURRENT anti-discrimination laws thaty disallow ssearching more than two Arabs on any particular flight.

Thank you for choosing United, Mr. bin Laden

Last week, 9-11 commissioner John Lehman revealed that "it was the policy (before 9-11) and I believe remains the policy today to fine airlines if they have more than two young Arab males in secondary questioning because that's discriminatory." Hmmm ... Is 19 more than two? Why, yes, I believe it is. So if two Jordanian cab drivers are searched before boarding a flight out of Newark, Osama bin Laden could then board that plane without being questioned. I'm no security expert, but I'm pretty sure this gives terrorists an opening for an attack. . . .

I have news for liberals: Bin Laden is still determined to attack inside the United States! Could they please tell us when and where the next attack will be? Because unless we know that, it's going to be difficult to stop it if we can't search Arabs.

4/14/2004

ARPNOW.ORG

Kack Kemp, Dick Armey, and the unfortunately named Dorcas Hardy have set up an organization based on promoting Social Security privitization.

Jack Kemp: The FICA slush fund

I, along with former House Majority Leader Dick Armey and former Social Security Commissioner Dorcas Hardy, have created the Alliance for Retirement Prosperity (www.arpnow.org). We want to make it possible for today's workers to move half of their payroll taxes into personal accounts that would be there for their retirement. For a single worker earning $30,000 a year and a two-earner married couple earning $30,000 and $40,000 that would mean annual savings of $2,000 and $4,500, respectively.

Most importantly, large personal retirement accounts would be a real source of prosperity and ownership and bring to fruition our vision of democratizing the American dream - making every American worker a shareholder and investor in our capitalistic system.

Michelle Malkin - Beautiful

Yeah, she's pretty . . . she's also a hell of a columnist.

She absolutely nails it in this retrospective on the attitudes of the NYT.

The liberals who cried 'didn't do enough!

That's right. The same editorial board that has barbecued the Bush Justice Department after the Sept. 11 attacks for fingerprinting young male temporary visa holders traveling from terror-sponsoring and terror-friendly nations (editorial, June 6, 2002); temporarily detaining asylum seekers from high-risk countries for background screening (editorial, Dec. 28, 2002); and sending undercover agents to investigate mosques suspected of supporting terrorism (editorial, May 31, 2002) now expects us to believe it would have applauded Bush for his vigilance if he had swiftly ordered airport security officials to stop thousands of young Middle Eastern men at airports during the summer of 2001 on the basis of an ill-defined threat.

Pre- v. Post- 9-11 Dems

Retroactive hard-liners

The pre-9/11 Democrats, as portrayed by their reaction to the work of the 9/11 Commission, are not plagued by niggling civil-liberty concerns. . . .
The pre-9/11 Democrats don't care about planning or diplomacy. . . .
The pre-9/11 Democrats are ethnically insensitive. . . .
Finally, the pre-9/11 Democrats are perfectly willing to act on sketchy intelligence. . . .

Ashcroft Bombs Gorelick

Ashcroft laid this devastating comment and the feet of 9-11 Commission member Jamie Gorelick yesterday during his testimony.

Gorelick's conflict

Attorney General John Ashcroft came out swinging in testimony before the 9-11 Commission on Tuesday. "In 1995, the Justice Department embraced flawed legal reasoning, imposing a series of restrictions on the FBI that went beyond what the law required," he said. "The 1995 Guidelines and the procedures developed around them imposed draconian barriers to communications between the law enforcement and intelligence communities. The wall left intelligence agents afraid to talk with criminal prosecutors or agents. In 1995, the Justice Department designed a system destined to fail."

But Ashcroft's bombshell wasn't his description of the Clinton Administration's policies, which have been discussed by previous witnesses. "Somebody built this wall," Ashcroft told the commissioners, and then went on to accuse one of the commission's own.

"The basic architecture for the wall . . . was contained in a classified memorandum entitled 'Instructions on Separation of Certain Foreign Counterintelligence and Criminal Investigations,'" said Ashcroft. "Full disclosure compels me to inform you that its author is a member of this Commission." Ashcroft was referring to Jamie Gorelick, who served as Deputy Attorney General in the Clinton Administration.

Bush's Press Conference Highlight

A great response to a fair question.

Sounds like Bush has been listening to the pundits/bloggers out there who have been critiquing those who are Post-Emptive now but wish we'd been Pre-Emptive then.

Washington Post: Text of Bush's Press Conference

QUESTION: You have been accused of letting the 9-11 threat mature too far, but not letting the Iraq threat mature far enough. First, could you respond to that general criticism?

And, secondly, in the wake of these two conflicts, what is the appropriate threat level to justify action in perhaps other situations going forward?

BUSH: Yes. I guess there have been some that said, well, we should've taken pre-emptive action in Afghanistan, and then turned around and said we shouldn't have taken pre-emptive action in Iraq.

And my answer to that question is, is that, again I repeat what I said earlier, prior to 9-11, the country really wasn't on a war footing. And the, frankly, mood of the world would have been astounded had the United States acted unilaterally in trying to deal with al-Qaida in that part of the world.

It would have been awfully hard to do, as well, by the way. We would have had -- we hadn't got our relationship right with Pakistan yet. The Caucus area would have been very difficult from which to base. It just seemed an impractical strategy at the time. And, frankly, I didn't contemplate it.

Clarke's Big Adventure

A fun satire of what the movie of Richard Clarke's new book may look like . . .

Ben Shapiro : Richard Clarke's new movie

BUSH (begins to suck his thumb, petulantly)

Well, fine, if you say so. But try to find out how Saddam's involved. Do I at least get to bomb somebody? Somebody Muslim? I hate those [Arabs]. They don't believe in my favorite philosopher, Jesus.

(proudly)

That's what Pat and Jerry told me.

Vice President Cheney enters the room.

CHENEY (soothingly)

I'll take it from here, George. You go back to playing with your blocks. And, yes, we get to bomb somebody.

Cheney puts his arm around Bush and smiles evilly.

NOTE: I object to the term used to describe Arabs in this piece so I edited it out.

Prager on Racism

A fairly weak column by the normally fantastic Dennis Prager.

He did make on great point though . . .

Dennis Prager: Bob Kerrey clarifies the liberal view of blacks and women

It is probable that belief in black inferiority, or at least in black differentness, also helps to explain white liberal support for the lowering of standards for blacks, i.e., affirmative action and quotas. Conservatives believe that no changing of standards is necessary in order for blacks to succeed.

Two from the Sowell

Thomas Sowell's reactions to the 9-11 panel's activities.

Titanic irresponsibility

All this political grandstanding is taking place in the shadow of the greatest danger our nation has ever faced. North Korea is not only rebuilding its nuclear capacity, it is a threat to sell nuclear weapons to terrorist organizations, including those who planned the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

Titanic irresponsibility: Part II

Most of us at the time would probably not have believed that we could have gone this long without another and perhaps more catastrophic terrorist attack on the United States. Do you remember how every symbolic occasion -- the World Series, Christmas, New Year's Eve, the Super Bowl -- brought widespread fears that this could be when the terrorists would strike us again?

Yet our respite from terrorist attack has seldom brought even a grudging acknowledgement that perhaps the government's anti-terrorism policies and activities might deserve some credit, instead of the constant barrage of media and political criticism and carping.

Make no mistake, a new and more terrible terrorist attack could happen here at any time -- especially now that Spain has shown how easy it is to panic politicians. But the fact that our enemies see our politics as the weakest link in the chain of American national security means that we need to recognize that as well.

Economy Issues

USA TODAY: Dazzled by data, economists see blue skies ahead

WASHINGTON — Some economists are raising their forecasts for growth in the first quarter of 2004, based on surging consumer spending, rising factory orders and glimmers of a turnaround in the job market. . . .

"Off the top of my head, I would say that we just moved from 4% gross-domestic-product growth in (the first quarter of 2004) to something like 5%." . . . [says Steve Stanley]

Brian Wesbury . . . predicted the government could report a 6% growth rate in the GDP . . . .

The . . . Labor Department reported April 2 that the economy created more than 300,000 jobs in March - a sign the "jobless recovery" may be easing. . . .

A survey of 1,200 businesses . . . found that 88% of business owners were optimistic about the next six months, with 21% planning to add full-time employees.

9-11 Widows Talk too Much*

A great column on those ubiquitous 9-11 widows - the "Jersey Girls."

Here are some choice comments from this excellent article.

DOROTHY RABINOWITZ'S MEDIA LOG: The 9/11 Widows - Americans are beginning to tire of them.

Debra Burlingame--lifelong Democrat, sister of Charles F. "Chic" Burlingame III, captain of American Airlines flight 77, which crashed into the Pentagon on Sept. 11, did manage to land an interview after Ms. Rice's appearance. When she had finished airing her views critical of the accusatory tone and tactics of the Jersey Girls, her interviewer, ABC congressional reporter Linda Douglass marveled, "This is the first time I've heard this point of view." . . .

. . . TV and newspaper editors were [interested in telling] a different story--that of four intrepid New Jersey housewives who had, as one news report had it, brought an administration "to its knees"--and that was, as far as they were concerned, the only story. . . .

The venerable status accorded this group of widows comes as no surprise given our times, an age quick to confer both celebrity and authority on those who have suffered. [Ed. note - what a profound statement this is.] . . . All that the widows have had to say . . . has been received by most of the media and members of Congress with utmost wonder and admiration. They had become prosecutors and investigators, unearthing clues and connections related to 9/11, with, we're regularly informed, unrivalled dedication and skill. . . .

. . . with every passing month, their list of government agencies and agents guilty of dereliction of duty grew apace. So did their assurance that it had been given to them, as victims, to determine the proper standards of taste and respectfulness to be applied in everything related to Sept. 11, including, it turned out, the images of the destroyed World Trade Center in George Bush's first campaign ad . . . .

. . . Ms. Breitweiser's analyses . . . of the ways the Sept. 11 attack might have been foiled. If the Federal Aviation Administration had properly alerted passengers to the dangers they faced, she asked, how many victims might have thought twice before boarding an aircraft? And "how many victims would have taken notice of these Middle Eastern men while they were boarding their plane? Could these men have been stopped?"

A good question. One can only imagine how a broadcast of the warning, "Watch out for Middle Eastern men in line near you, as you board your flight," would have gone down in those quarters of the culture daily worried to death about the alleged threat to civil rights posed by profiling and similar steps designed to weed out terrorists. Consider . . . what the response would have been if John Ashcroft had issued a statement calling for such a precaution, prior to Sept. 11. [Emphasis added.]

*"Kate! Time out, Kate! You've had three times now. That's enough for you. Women talk too much!" -- Mark Shields to Kate O'Bierne on "The Capital Gang," CNN, April 10

4/13/2004

RNC Has a Sense of Humor

This is great!

Kerry made up his own Misery Index . . . so so did the RNC . . . but theirs is funnier!

U.S. Newswire - RNC Announces Index De Le Miserables

Kerry Repudiates St. Petersburg Dems

FINALLY!

I am enheartened to hear that a major Dem has actively denounced someone from their party who made a statement which, if it had been uttered by a conservative, would have been both considered hate speech AND immediately decried by conservatives around the nation.

Keep it up conservatives! (Denouncing "our own" when they do something wrong, that is.) The Dems just may be learning something by osmosis!

USATODAY.com - St. Petersburg Democratic club ad says 'pull trigger' on Rumsfeld

MIAMI (AP) — Florida Republicans are crying foul after a St. Petersburg Democratic club placed a full-page ad in a weekly newspaper, saying Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld should be "put up against a wall" and someone should "pull the trigger."

The ad, appearing in last Thursday's edition of the Gabber, a weekly paper covering the Pinellas County community of Gulfport, included a lengthy criticism of the Bush administration's handling of the war in Iraq and then singled out Rumsfeld.

"And then there's Rumsfeld who said of Iraq 'We have our good days and our bad days.' We should put this S.O.B. up against a wall and say 'This is one of our bad days,' and pull the trigger," the ad read under a banner "St. Petersburg Democratic Club." . . .

Mark Kornblau, a Kerry campaign spokesman, said the club was not working for their campaign "in any official capacity" and called for an apology.

"It is outrageous and does not in any way reflect the position of our campaign. We hope that those responsible will retract the statement, apologize for it and move on to more productive pursuits," Kornblau said.

Maddox said in a statement that the ad was "reprehensible and in poor taste" and urged its immediate removal and a formal apology.

State party spokeswoman Allie Merzer said the group is a social club chartered by the state Democratic party but does not receive funds from the state party and did not consult party before the ad was placed. She said the state party was reviewing the club's charter membership.

Bush Pre-Emptively Attacks Afghanistan . . . 2001

Nice satire of the current situation and outcry v. what would have happened had Bush done what today's detractors are saying they wished he'd have done.

The New Republic Online: Easterbrook

AN ALTERNATIVE HISTORY: Washington, April 9, 2004. A hush fell over the city as George W. Bush today became the first president of the United States ever to be removed from office by impeachment. Meeting late into the night, the Senate unanimously voted to convict Bush following a trial on his bill of impeachment from the House.

Moments after being sworn in as the 44th president, Dick Cheney said that disgraced former national security adviser Condoleezza Rice would be turned over to the Hague for trial in the International Court of Justice as a war criminal. Cheney said Washington would "firmly resist" international demands that Bush be extradited for prosecution as well.

On August 7, 2001, Bush had ordered the United States military to stage an all-out attack on alleged terrorist camps in Afghanistan. Thousands of U.S. special forces units parachuted into this neutral country, while air strikes targeted the Afghan government and its supporting military. Pentagon units seized abandoned Soviet air bases throughout Afghanistan, while establishing support bases in nearby nations such as Uzbekistan. Simultaneously, FBI agents throughout the United States staged raids in which dozens of men accused of terrorism were taken prisoner. . . .

5.19.2002

5.19.2002.

That's

2002

just in case you did not notice.

Aug. Memo Focused On Attacks in U.S. (washingtonpost.com)

The top-secret briefing memo presented to President Bush on Aug. 6 carried the headline, "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.," and was primarily focused on recounting al Qaeda's past efforts to attack and infiltrate the United States, senior administration officials said.

The document, known as the President's Daily Briefing, underscored that Osama bin Laden and his followers hoped to "bring the fight to America," in part as retaliation for U.S. missile strikes on al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan in 1998, according to knowledgeable sources.

This memo has been known for a while now.

Thanks to James Taranto at OpinionJournal for the head's up in his Best of the Web Today.

4/12/2004

Kerry Loves Misery

Rush et al. have this one right: if it's bad news for America, it's good news for Kerry and the Dems.

Here's a story about Kerry's trumped up "Misery Index" - the 2004 version.

FOXNews.com - You Decide 2004 - Kerry Economic Plan Relies on Safe Numbers

WASHINGTON - Presumptive Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry (search) unveiled his own version of the 'misery index' on Monday, claiming Americans are miserable because President Bush has done such a bad job with the U.S. economy.

And now a word from Factcheck.org:

FactCheck.org: Kerry's "Misery Index" Accentuates the Negative

The original ‘misery index’ is simply the jobless rate added to the inflation rate. The term was coined by economist Arthur Okun, an economic adviser in Lyndon Johnson’s administration. It was widely used during the "stagflation" of the '70s and '80s when stagnant economic growth kept unemployment high and inflation reduced the buying power of wages.

By that classic misery measure the country is faring better than average under Bush: the unemployment rate for March was 5.7% -- which is just 0.1% above the average for all months since 1948. And the inflation rate remains historically low – the Labor Department’s Consumer Price Index rose only 1.7% in the 12 months ending in February, the most recent month on record. So the classic “misery index” number is currently 7.4.

That's lower than it's been in all but 20 of the previous 56 years on record. It never got this low during any of the years under Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan or Bush's father.

And the classic "misery index" was higher in every one of Clinton's first four years than it has been in any of Bush's years. It was not until Clinton's second term that the long economic boom of the 1990's pulled the index down to below its current level. . . .

So it's not surprising that the Kerry campaign has come up with another way of looking at the economy. On April 12 Kerry issued a news release saying "Middle-Class Misery Hits Record Under George Bush," based on a new index put together by former Clinton economic adviser Gene Sperling and former Al Gore adviser Jason Furman.

The Kerry index is, to put it mildly, selective.

Rather than use all consumer prices, the Kerry index cherry-picks three items that have gone up faster than the overall rate of inflation: college tuition (at public four-year universities only), gasoline, and health care.

And rather than use the overall unemployment rate -- which was 5.5% at this point in Clinton's first term, only two-tenths of one percent lower than now -- Kerry has used the number of jobs, which produces a more negative picture.

Other statistical indicators chosen by Kerry are median family income and bankruptcies, which have both worsened under Bush, and home ownership -- the only one of the seven indicators in the Kerry index to show improvement. . . .

Contributing the most to the gloomy picture presented by Kerry's index is college tuition. Kerry aides used only the figure for four-year public colleges and universities, which has shot up 13% under Bush, even after adjusting for inflation. But they excluded tuition for private colleges and universities, which went up only 5%. (Both figures are from the College Board's annual survey of college costs.)

When it came to measuring the change in employment, however, the Kerry aides focused on the loss of private sector jobs only, not total employment. That ignored gains in hiring of local, state and federal workers. The economy has lost 2.6 million private-sector jobs since Bush took office, but government hiring has kept the total job loss to just 1.8 million. The Kerry index uses the larger figure, making their index look worse.

This from the semi-neutral Factcheck.org.

Of course, the story about Kerry fumbling the numbers just wasn't enough. Here's their final paragraph:

Kerry isn't the only one spinning economic figures, of course. We pointed out earlier a Republican attempt to claim that after-tax income was up when the Census Bureau reported it was down. Our advice: be wary of all politicians spouting economic statistics.

They just couldn't resist.

Canadian Fair Play

Free speech is all fine a dandy unless it is something the gov't disagrees with.

Remember folks, this article is abOOt FREE SPEECH, not homosexual rights. I hate to break it to you on the Left (and the Right for that matter) but you DO NOT have a RIGHT to silence people who disagree with you. Deal with it.

When two people disagree with what each other is saying, say one is a pro-choice activist and the other a pro-life activist, who would get to stifle the other? According to the principle above, EITHER one could claim that the other was saying something they did not like and which, they felt, oppressed them. So who would win? The first guy to the courthouse?

It's happening here as well, folks.

Stomping on free speech

'Canada is a pleasantly authoritarian country," Alan Borovoy, general counsel of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, said a few years ago. An example of what he means is Bill C-250, a repressive, anti-free-speech measure that is on the brink of becoming law in Canada. It would add "sexual orientation" to the Canadian hate propaganda law, thus making public criticism of homosexuality a crime. It is sometimes called the "Bible as Hate Literature" bill. . . . It could ban publicly expressed opposition to gay marriage or any other political goal of gay groups. The bill has a loophole for religious opposition to homosexuality, but few scholars think it will offer protection, given the strength of the gay lobby and the trend toward censorship in Canada. Law Prof. David Bernstein, in his new book "You Can't Say That!" wrote that "it has apparently become illegal in Canada to advocate traditional Christian opposition to homosexual sex." Or traditional Jewish or Muslim opposition, too.

Since Canada has no First Amendment, anti-bias laws generally trump free speech and freedom of religion. A recent flurry of cases has mostly gone against free expression. The Saskatchewan Human Rights Commission ruled that a newspaper ad listing biblical passages that oppose homosexuality was a human-rights offense. . . . a British Columbia court upheld the one-month suspension, without pay, of a high school teacher who wrote letters to a local paper arguing that homosexuality is not a fixed orientation but a condition that can and should be treated. The teacher, Chris Kempling, was not accused of discrimination, merely of expressing thoughts that the state defines as improper.

That anti-free-speech principle, social conservatives argue, will become explicit national policy under C-250, with criminal penalties attached. Religious groups say it would become risky for them to teach certain biblical passages. . . . And since C-250 does not mention homosexuality but focuses broadly on "sexual orientation," Canada's freewheeling judiciary may explicitly extend protection to many "sexual minorities." Pedophilia and sadism are among the conditions listed by the American Psychiatric Association under "sexual orientation."

Jacoby: No One Did it Right

Jeff Jacoby points out the fantastic Monday Morning Quarterbacking of the current MEDIA circus.

The point: NO ONE was worrying too much about Islamist terrorists before 9/11. Not the President and his administration. Not the Dems. Not the Senate Intelligence Committee. NO ONE.

Jeff Jacoby: Everyone got it wrong before 9/11

We'll get to last week's big Washington story -- Condoleezza's Rice's testimony before the Sept. 11 Commission -- in a moment. But first, a short quiz:

1. Identify the following list of topics:

"The World Bank's mission creep"
"Getting debt relief right"
"Russia's unformed foreign policy"
"Japan, the reluctant reformer"
"With a friend like Fox"
"Caspian energy at the crossroads."

No clue? Don't feel bad. You would have to be suffering from acute foreign-policy wonkishness to recognize the table of contents from the September/ October 2001 issue of Foreign Affairs, the flagship publication of the Council on Foreign Relations. Like the curious incident of the dog in the night-time -- in the famous Sherlock Holmes tale, the "curious incident" was that the dog didn't bark -- the significance of these headlines is not in what they say but in what they don't say: The nation's leading journal of international relations was paying no attention to the threat from Islamist terror even as Islamist terrorists were planning the deadliest attack ever committed by foreign enemies on US soil.

2. Which US senator admitted on Sept. 11, 2001, "We have always known this could happen. . . . I regret to say -- I served on the Intelligence Committee up until last year. I can remember after the bombings of the embassies, after TWA 800, we went through this flurry of activity, talking about it -- but not really doing the hard work of responding.''

That was John Kerry on "Larry King Live," ruing his and his colleagues' pre-9/11 failure to give the threat from international terrorism the urgent attention and "hard work of responding" it should have had.

3. President Clinton's final national security policy paper, submitted to Congress in December 2000, was 45,000 words long. Yet it never once mentioned which international menace?

Al Qaeda. The document referred to Osama bin Laden just four times, and its discussion of terrorism spoke not of wiping out the killers in their nests but of extraditing "fugitives" to make them "answer for their crimes."

Economic Reality

The doom and gloom crowd will dislike this column.

All about number which show the economy is upward bound . . . and has been.

OpinionJournal.comThe Dangerfield Economy

By nearly every objective measure, the U.S. economy is strong and getting stronger. Just look at the Misery Index, the measure created by the late economist Arthur Okun adding the rates of unemployment and inflation. This may not be the most sophisticated of metrics, but it does capture the two greatest threats to household wealth and security. And it's indicating that, comparisons to the 1990s' bubble years excepted, the U.S. economy is doing very well.

Today's unemployment rate of 5.7% is close to the level Bill Clinton boasted about as he sought re-election in 1996. Meanwhile, inflation has fallen by a full percentage point over the past eight years. As the nearby table shows, the economy compares favorably by re-election standards and President Bush's policies should be enjoying at least a modicum of respect.

Blair: Never Give Up, Never Surrender!

An incredible piece from Tony Blair.

Anyone anti-Iraq should be required to read this piece.

Tony Blair: Why we must never abandon this historic struggle in Iraq

We are locked in a historic struggle in Iraq. On its outcome hangs more than the fate of the Iraqi people. Were we to fail, which we will not, it is more than 'the power of America' that would be defeated. The hope of freedom and religious tolerance in Iraq would be snuffed out. Dictators would rejoice; fanatics and terrorists would be triumphant. Every nascent strand of moderate Arab opinion, knowing full well that the future should not belong to fundamentalist religion, would be set back in bitter disappointment.
If we succeed - if Iraq becomes a sovereign state, governed democratically by the Iraqi people; the wealth of that potentially rich country, their wealth; the oil, their oil; the police state replaced by the rule of law and respect for human rights - imagine the blow dealt to the poisonous propaganda of the extremists. Imagine the propulsion toward change it would inaugurate all over the Middle East. . . .

They know it is a historic struggle. They know their victory would do far more than defeat America or Britain. It would defeat civilisation and democracy everywhere. They know it, but do we? The truth is, faced with this struggle, on which our own fate hangs, a significant part of Western opinion is sitting back, if not half-hoping we fail, certainly replete with schadenfreude at the difficulty we find.

So what exactly is the nature of the battle inside Iraq itself? This is not a 'civil war', though the purpose of the terrorism is undoubtedly to try to provoke one. The current upsurge in violence has not spread throughout Iraq. Much of Iraq is unaffected and most Iraqis reject it. The insurgents are former Saddam sympathisers, angry that their status as 'boss' has been removed, terrorist groups linked to al-Qaeda and, most recently, followers of the Shia cleric, Muqtada-al-Sadr.

The latter is not in any shape or form representative of majority Shia opinion. He is a fundamentalist, an extremist, an advocate of violence. He is wanted in connection with the murder of the moderate and much more senior cleric, Ayatollah al Khoei last year. The prosecutor, an Iraqi judge, who issued a warrant for his arrest, is the personification of how appallingly one-sided some of the Western reporting has become. Dismissed as an American stooge, he has braved assassination attempts and extraordinary intimidation in order to follow proper judicial process and has insisted on issuing the warrant despite direct threats to his life in doing so.

There you have it. On the one side, outside terrorists, an extremist who has created his own militia, and remnants of a brutal dictatorship which murdered hundreds of thousands of its own people and enslaved the rest. On the other side, people of immense courage and humanity who dare to believe that basic human rights and liberty are not alien to Arab and Middle Eastern culture, but are their salvation. . . .

By 1 June, electricity will be 6,000MW, 50 per cent more than prewar, but short of the 7,500MW they now need because of the massive opening up of the economy, set to grow by 60 per cent this year and 25 per cent the next.

The first private banks are being opened. A new currency is in circulation. Those in work have seen their salaries trebled or quadrupled and unemployment is falling. One million cars have been imported. Thirty per cent now have satellite TV, once banned, where they can watch al-Jazeera, the radical Arab TV station, telling them how awful the Americans are.

The internet is no longer forbidden. Shrines are no longer shut. Groups of women and lawyers meet to discuss how they can make sure the new constitution genuinely promotes equality. The universities eagerly visit Western counterparts to see how a modern, higher-education system, free to study as it pleases, would help the new Iraq.

People in the West ask: why don't they speak up, these standard-bearers of the new Iraq? Why don't the Shia clerics denounce al-Sadr more strongly? I understand why the question is asked. But the answer is simple: they are worried. They remember 1991, when the West left them to their fate. They know their own street, unused to democratic debate, rife with every rumour, and know its volatility. They read the Western papers and hear its media. And they ask, as the terrorists do: have we the stomach to see it through? . . .

But our greatest threat, apart from the immediate one of terrorism, is our complacency. When some ascribe, as they do, the upsurge in Islamic extremism to Iraq, do they really forget who killed whom on 11 September 2001? When they call on us to bring the troops home, do they seriously think that this would slake the thirst of these extremists, to say nothing of what it would do to the Iraqis?

Or if we scorned our American allies and told them to go and fight on their own, that somehow we would be spared? If we withdraw from Iraq, they will tell us to withdraw from Afghanistan and, after that, to withdraw from the Middle East completely and, after that, who knows? But one thing is for sure: they have faith in our weakness just as they have faith in their own religious fanaticism. And the weaker we are, the more they will come after us.

It is not easy to persuade people of all this; to say that terrorism and unstable states with WMD are just two sides of the same coin; to tell people what they don't want to hear; that, in a world in which we in the West enjoy all the pleasures, profound and trivial, of modern existence, we are in grave danger.

There is a battle we have to fight, a struggle we have to win and it is happening now in Iraq.

4/11/2004

Ad Hominem Challenge

To date, not a single person on the Left has taken up my challenge. Mostly because they know that they cannot meet it's requirements. But I still want the point to be made: the Dems and the Left are often engaged in the odious practice of directly attacking the person rather than his or her record. They call people names, float incredulous trheories without any proof, and generally demonstrate all that is the worst in American politics. And I mean MAJOR, HIGH PROFILE, Dems and Lefties, not just the far-left folks at democraticunderground.com.

Reps do not do so. While they are not perfect, you cannot find a SINGLE incidence of a HIGH_RANKING, OFFICIAL REP representative who has done the same. That's my challenge.

Here's a re-issue of that challenge:

Ad Hominem Challenge Update

Last week I posted a challenge to my liberal friends to supply me with a single cite of Rep attacks. Here's what I said:

A challenge to the Left: find me ONE, just ONE, instance of Bush or another Senior Administration Official calling Kerry names. I don't mean saying that he did such and such as a Senator. I mean calling him "crooked" or a liar or some other ad hominem attack. Just ONE pure ad hominem attack.

I am extending that challenge and offering an incentive:

Find me one high-ranking Rep OFFICIAL (equivalent on the Rep side as Gore, Kerry, Dean, etc. are to the Dems) who has called Kerry and compatriots names and engaged in outright ad hominem attacks.

Find me one verifiable cite, WITH SOURCE MATERIAL FOR CHECKING IT OUT, and I will put a link to your site at the top of my blogroll and encourage everyone who visits this page to go a read your site daily.

Are you up to it Media Revolution or Rickfman or any of my other liberal (oh, sorry, I mean "progressive," isn't that the current euphemism?) readers?

Digital TV on Its Way To a Set Near You

Why in the hell is THIS a law?

What bureaucratic nincompoop decided that ALL US TV STATIONS need to broadcast only in digital by 2006?

What possible purpose could this rule serve?

Will programming get better? I doubt it.
Will advertisers get a better return on their money spent? I doubt it?
Will this "help the children"? Uh-uh.
Will it help TV makers sell more expensive HDTV sets? Yep.

I am a decided capitalist folks, as regular readers know. But this is GOV'T forcing the issue.

If the market, if PEOPLE, decide that they need HDTV and prefer digital signals . . . then it would happen. Why do we need a GOV'T RULE requiring such a transition?

Will it help national security? The economy? Whiskey tango . . . ?

FOXNews.com - Foxlife - TV Gets Up Close and Personal

Foul Ball from Left Field

Here's is James P. Pinkerton's assessment of Dr. Rice's testimony and the subsequent release of the PDB.

It is an excellent source for an all-in-one-place recount of how the Left will approach these event.

He willfully twists all of it into to sounding as though Bush got a memo saying, "Bin Laden, 9-11-01, early morning, Twin Towers, Pentagon, Capital, 4 planes."

He also likes making Dr. Rice sounds as though she was a schoolgirl out of her depth at the hearings.

If that's how the Left wants to see it, fine. I think that the average American who read the text of the memo, and hears the comments of Mr. Ben-Veniste's fellow panel members, will understand that this was a warning from 3 YEARS earlier.

When someone comes up to you and tells you that, three years ago, someone threatened the last guy who held the job you now hold, but who hasn't been heard from about it since, would you jump up and do something? Or would you, like most people, think that that was interesting but not enough to act on just yet since there WERE reports of other things happening that WERE recent and immediate?

All of this is the Left imploding. They cannot stand Bush and will purposely make it sound as though Bin Laden called up and said he was a-comin'.

He didn't . Get over it.

Newsday.com: Pre-9/11 doings are coming to light

4/09/2004

Just Damn II

Will the administration EVER stop allowing itself to be blackmailed by BIG MEDIA?

FOXNews.com - Politics - Presidential Brief to Go Public

MSNBC - Does Rice really know her role?

Howard Fineman v. The Rock

KNOW YOUR ROLE!

That's the famous taunt that pro wrestler The Rock (Dwayne Johnson) screams at opponents when they overstep their bounds.

It's a play on the old misogynistic attitude of a he-man telling the lowly woman that she should be barefoot and pregnant . . . she should "know her role" and not get such high falutin' ideas about things off-limits like reading, having friends, and making what SHE would prefer for dinner.

But The Rock can say it to anyone he wants because he's the ultimate bad-a** and can show contempt for anyone (or so the scenario goes).

Today, Howard Fineman, Newsweek’s chief political correspondent and an NBC News analyst, tells Dr. Condileeza Rice to "KNOW HER ROLE"; Apparently in his mind has overstepped her rightful place by becoming one of the most powerful women in the world with the ear of the President of the United States . . . and not doing it the way Mr. Fineman would have her do it.

At one point her says of Dr. Rice that she is "[a] self-proclaimed expert at understanding 'structural' change in large institutions . . . ."

How condescending can you get?

What are her credentials in this area? I don't know. Does he? He might want to make a note of her actual experience and thus prove that she does not have any in the concept of "change" in a large institution. Instead, like so many leading Libs nowadays, he simply makes the accusation and does nothing to back it up. (cf. Howard Dean to Diane Rehm, John Kerry on Foreign Leaders, Edward Kennedy on a War made up in Texas)

MSNBC - Does Rice really know her role?
Let's look at that non-biased portray of Dr. Rice in this article:

"A self-proclaimed expert . . . ."
"Rice wasn't aware — may still not be aware — . . . ."
"The student of bureaucratic change didn't really attempt to foment any, at least not with the kind of urgency we know she needed to have." Gotta love hindsight, eh Libs?
"And Rice's tone was perhaps too steely: The response to terrorism over the years had been "insufficient," she said. What a bland word when a soothing sense of regret was required. She was a bureaucrat explaining "structure" to a national audience (and a chamber full of family members) that yearned for blunt talk."
"Rice . . . is just a cog in a machine."
"The president was given the now-famous PDB of Aug. 6, 2001, which suggested not only that Osama bin Laden was "determined " to attack inside the United States, but that the FBI had picked up a pattern that suggested the possibility of hijackings here." According to testimony, that's incorrect. The PDB talked of PAST threats made in the PAST but not NOW . . . PAST. This was NOT a warning that "planes a acomin' . . . ."
"Already on the defensive for his leadership in the post 9/11 world . . . ." Being attacked, yes. "On the defensive"? No.

Finally, we have this wonderful bit toward the end of the piece:

Remember the picture of the president in the classroom being told by Andy Card of the attack? The American people thought they were seeing a man suddenly thrust into a grave challenge no one could have anticipated. That won him enormous sympathy and patience from the voters. But what if he was literally on vacation — at the ranch in Crawford — when he should have been making sure that someone was ringing alarm bells throughout the bureaucracy?

So you mean Bush WASN'T "thrust into a grave challenge no one could have anticipated"? Then what exactly DID happen, Mr. Fineman?

What a weird conspiracy theory twist to an otherwise unexceptional piece of non-biased media.

Thank god we don't have any bias in the press.

4/08/2004

Kerry on Clarke: He's Wrong

Bob Kerrey, president of New School University in New York and a former Democratic senator from Nebraska, is a member of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (the "9/11" Commission).

The Search for Answers: Richard Clarke is wrong about Iraq.

Mr. Clarke's most startling statement was that there have been more terrorist attacks against the United States in the 30 months since 9/11 than in the 30 months prior to the attack. You could almost hear a clap of thunder when he went on to say that this happened because we substantially reduced our efforts in Afghanistan and went to war in Iraq, causing a loss of momentum in the war against al Qaeda.

That's his argument. I think he's wrong, but I don't think he is being duplicitous. He is wrong because most if not all of the terrorism since 9/11 has occurred because al Qaeda and other radical Islamists have an even dimmer view of a free and independent Iraq than they do a free and independent United States. A democracy in Iraq that embraces modernism, pluralism, tolerance and the plebiscite is a greater sacrilege than anything we are doing here at home.

Mr. Clarke's views on Iraq notwithstanding, after 9/11 we could not afford either to run the risk that Saddam Hussein would be deterred by our military efforts to contain him or that these military deployments would become attractive targets for further acts of terrorism. I supported President Bush's efforts to persuade the United Nations Security Council to change a 10-year-old resolution that authorized force to contain Saddam Hussein to one that authorized force to replace his dictatorship. And I believe the president did the right thing to press ahead even without the Security Council's support. Remember, the June 25, 1996, attack on Khobar Towers that left 19 American airmen dead happened because of our containment efforts. Sailors had also died enforcing the Security Council's embargo and our pilots were risking their lives every day flying missions over northern and southern Iraq to protect Iraqi Kurds and Shiites. . . .

This debate becomes all the more important since the work of this commission--to examine an attack against the U.S. that occurred nearly three years ago--has been overshadowed by the events taking place in Iraq. The war there is not over. Twelve marines were killed in Ramadi Tuesday night in what has become a dramatic escalation of violence against coalition forces. I believe this escalation is taking place precisely because the country is about to be handed over to the Iraqi people to run themselves.

Sowell on Hidden Costs of Gov't

Two excellent articles from Thomas Sowell, award-winning economist, on the hidden costs of Gov't regs.

Counting the costs

Government restrictions are attractive to people who want to impose their pet notions without having to count the costs. There may be estimated costs -- often disputed estimates -- but there is nothing to force those estimates to include all the things that will become more costly because of a given policy.

Nor is there anything to force the original estimates to bear any resemblance to the actual costs that end up being paid by the taxpayers and others.

In the marketplace, you can believe that every additional cost your decision creates is likely to show up in the price tag. . . .

The government can overlook all sorts of costs -- but those costs do not go away. There is no free lunch.

Counting the costs: Part II

Not so when it is the taxpayers' money or -- better yet -- money that business is forced to spend, which does not even show up on the government's budget.

One of the reasons costs do not get counted is that costs are often confused with prices. All the political noises being made about importing pharmaceutical drugs from Canada, or other schemes to reduce drug prices, do not face up to the 800-pound gorilla staring us in the face -- the $800 million it costs to develop a new drug.

You can control the price of drugs all you want, whether by imports from Canada or in numerous other ways, but if that $800 million is not covered, you are not going to keep getting new drugs created at the same pace. That's when sick people will pay the real cost in needless pain and preventable deaths.

But the politicians do not have to count any such costs, especially if those costs materialize only after the next election.

Volokh on Condi Rxns

Volokh on Dr. Rice Rxns

Eugene Volokh has a great post on expected reactions to Rice's testimony.

"Hardball" Bingo:

I'm sufficiently confident about this that I think I can write up the scripts. Here are the buzzwords I expect from both sides. Play bingo at home (or, if you want, make it into a drinking game: one drink for each iteration of one of these words).

Of her demeanor, Rice supporters will say she was: "poised," "confident," "authoritative," and/or "polished."
Of her demeanor, Rice detractors will say she was: "defensive," "visibly annoyed," and/or "brusque" ; bonus (if they feel strongly) "petulant" and/or "schoolmarmish"

On the quality of her arguments, Rice supporters will say: "persuasive," "convincing," "firm," and/or "powerful"; bonus (if they feel strongly) "overpowering"
On the quality of her arguments, Rice detractors will say: "unpersuasive," "weak," "vacillating," and/or "shaky,"; bonus (if they feel strongly) "incoherent"

Overall, Rice supporters will describe her performance as: "a home run," "putting doubts to rest," "answering all the questions," "showing Clarke to be a liar," and/or "letting us get on to the people's business"; bonus (if they are really partisan) "refuting the demagogues on the other side"
Overall, Rice detractors will describe her performance as: "raising more questions than it answers," "a missed opportunity to inform the American people," "vindicating Richard Clarke," and/or "raising troubling questions about this Administration"; bonus (if they are really partisan) "you're the demagogue" (followed by: "am not!"; "are too!"; "am not!"; etc.)

4/07/2004

Dodd on the KKK

UPDATE:

The Washington Times has a damning piece which included the following quote from Sen. Dodd commenting on the Trent Lott kerfuffle in 2002:

Mr. Dodd was among the Democrats who called for Mr. Lott to lose his leadership post and said his party would deal with such comments differently.

"If Tom Daschle or another Democratic leader were to have made similar statements, the reaction would have been very swift," he said on CNN's "Late Edition" on Dec. 15, 2002. "I don't think several hours would have gone by without there being an almost unanimous call for the leader to step aside."

Many, if not most, conservative pundits called Lott on the carpet for his statements.

Most Dems cannot seem to bring themselves to do the same to analogous comments made by Dodd.

Typical do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do Dem reaction.

Original post:

Sen. Christopher Dodd wishes that the KKK's views had held sway during the Civil War. No really. I mean he DID praise Robert "KKK" Byrd as a "man for all seasons" and one which would be appropriate in all times of our great history. Therefore he must think that Byrd would have been appropriate during the civil war.

No one REALLY thought Lott wanted the segregationist version of Strom Thurmond to make policies.

No one truly believes that Dodd wants the KKK version of Byrd to make policies.

But Lott was railroaded and no one has said hardly a WORD about Dodd.

Poor Little Soldiers?

An excellent vetting of a Progressive screed about how the American military is a dumping ground for poor kids and how they all live in poverty.

If you believe this sort of thing, or know someone who does, point them here for a correction.

Thanks to Instapundit for the heads up.

Jason: The Progressive Disorder

But between the glaring factual errors, the total misunderstanding of military pay and benefit structures, and the condescending cultural elitism built into her prose, it's clear that Ehrenreich has no idea how to report on the military community. Neither does the editorial staff at The Progressive.

4/06/2004

My Impression of the Hare

I know, I know. I am terribly late in picking up on this.

In a fit of self-absorption, I was Googling for "The Art of The Blog" and "TAoTB" and came acrose Glenn Reynolds article about what makes a blog good. It linked to an old Lileks piece deconstructing an article in Britain's far-left Guardian.

Damned funny stuff.

The best part?

Here's the deal: we don?t need your support. But understand that if Iraqis had flown planes into Big Ben, we?d take out Saddam, because we understand that an attack on you is an attack on us. The West is not defined by Belgian edicts on acceptable levels of tomato sauce viscosity. The West is a set of ideas that need defending. Forgive us our passable wines; forgive our standardized veal. Forgive us our simple-mindedness, for we - from Alabama on outward to outer, distant Alabama and beyond - have a gut feeling that ?quarrels? usually boil down to two sides. Forgive us for believing that fascism's side ought to lose.

Enjoy! =)

Clarke Lied and the Lying Liar who Lied Lying Lied

Boortz brings up a GREAT bit to use in an discussion of Dick Clarke's claims.

Neal Boortz on Clarke's Claims

(BTW - after today, 4-06-04, you can click the original link and find the archive of today for the post.)

You are former president Bill Clinton. Your chief anti-terrorism guy, Richard Clarke, says that Al Qaeda was an absolute top priority during the final years of your term. In fact, Richard Clarke writes a book and testifies under oath telling everyone who will listen how focused you were on Al Qaeda while you were president.

So .. it's the end of your eight years in the White House. December, 2000. You are writing a report detailing your views on the major security threats facing the United States as you leave office. The report, which Richard Clarke helped you write, is 45,000 words long. That would be 168 pages using Microsoft Word, and if published as a book it would be about 220 pages long. Now that's quite a lot of words describing what you think are the major security concerns the next president needs to be aware of. And guess what? In all of those 45,000 words you don't mention the name "Al Qaeda" even one time. The greatest security concern facing America; isn't that what Richard Clarke said? And you don't even mention it one time in your report? Richard Clarke says that Condi Rice looked confused when he mentioned Al Qaeda ... but he didn't manage to get any reference to Al Qaeda included in your final report on security threats?

UPDATE: Here's a link to the Washington Times article on the subject: Al Qaeda absent from final Clinton report - The Washington Times: Nation/Politics

Free Speech v. Boycotts

A blogger wieghs in on the Kos kerfuffle.

Someday people will learn that FREE SPEECH and any violation thereof applies ONLY to the GOV'T and NEVER to PRIVATE CITIZENS who call someone on the carpet for saying (or doing) something stupid, wrong, reprehensible, evil, what have you.

What follows is the text of my comment on his post.

Why I don't raise money for politicians

I think no one should boycott anyone.

When Jesse Jackson calls for a boycott of someone for saying something reprehensible and racist, do you feel that the person who made the racist comment is having their "right to free speech" assaulted? Or do you feel that a private citizen is trying to mobilize people of like mind to convince advertisers (and other monetary supporters) to abandon the cretin?

This is the marketplace at work, guys. Sometimes it goes against the left, sometimes the right, sometimes the center. . . .

This time it was someone on the left who said something reprehensible and he was called on the carpet for it. As it should be.

If a bunch of lefties wanted to block Instapundit or Andy Sullivan, I'd be just as vociferious in defending their right to free speech.

When will people come to understand that FREE SPEECH is about the GOVERNMENT taking away your right to say something.

It has NOTHING to do with a private citizen (e.g. Michael Friedman) calling for what amounts to a boycott of someone else (e.g. Kos). Even if they do so in a particularly public way.

If The Heritage Foundation was truly supporting someone who says nuking Iraq is a good idea (it's not if you read the whole article btw), then I would expect and encourage the left to go after them. It would not be an abridgement of free speech but exactly the opposite - free speech in action.

What I find so silly, or outrageous, is that after a few e-mails . . . Democratic candidates ran like little bitches. . . . Hell, if they had investigated the situation, they would have found out the worst thing about the guy is that he's a Cubs fan . . . .

So saying to these murdered, mutilated veterans "screw 'em" is not as bad as being a Cubs fan? Funny. But not true.

The Dems realized that they did not want to be associated with that sentiment and I applaud them on their quick dissociation from such a vile comment.

Do I count as a right-wing troll or not?

Reacting to Terrorism

Three articles about terrorism: the way we should react to Fallujah, the failures of CAIR (Council on American-Islamic Relations), and the price to non-terrorist Muslims.

David Limbaugh: Iraqi violence should strengthen U.S. resolve

Once again, they'll be off base. The issue isn't simply whether there was a direct connection between Saddam and Osama. The more relevant question is whether military action against Iraq furthered our cause in the War on Terror.

Even if we don't have taped transcripts evidencing collusion between Saddam and Osama, we know beyond doubt that Iraq was a terrorist-sponsoring state and a safe-haven for Islamo-fascists.

Indeed, the terrorists' desperate and persistent efforts to thwart Iraq's transition to democratic self-rule vindicate the Bush Administration's conclusion that Iraq was and remains a pivotal target in the war. The violence fomented by Iraqi Shiite leader Moktada al-Sadr, and his brazen overtures to Hezbollah and Hamas, support President Bush's broader view that there is worldwide solidarity among international terrorists.

Joel Mowbray : Tolerating Terrorism

CAIR’s spokesman was given the opportunity to condemn Hamas and Islamic Jihad by the Washington Post in November 2001. His response was telling: “It’s not our job to go around denouncing.” Asked a similar question about Hamas and Hezbollah by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in February 2002, CAIR spokesman Ibrahim Hooper called such inquiries a “game” and explained, “We’re not in the business of condemning.”

But when Israel is to blame, CAIR seems to be very much “in the business of condemning.”

After Israel recently killed the founder of Hamas—a man responsible for the deaths of 52 mostly young Palestinian suicide bombers and 377 mostly civilian Israelis—CAIR saw fit to “condemn” the Jewish state without a moment’s pause. In its press release, CAIR said it “condemned the assassination of a wheelchair-bound Palestinian Muslim religious leader, calling it an act of ‘state terrorism.’”

CAIR couldn’t bring itself to call the founder of one of the bloodiest terrorist organizations on earth even a “militant,” let alone a “terrorist.” To them, a man with the blood of over 400 people on his hands was a handicapped “religious leader.” Seems awfully instructive about the kind of Islam they must follow if they label terrorist masterminds “religious leaders.”

Dennis Prager: Why no Christian suicide bombers? and other thoughts on Islamic terror

So, to better understand the subject, I offer three conclusions I drew about terror during my week of broadcasting from Israel last month.

First, Islamic terror is caused by Muslims, not, as Islamic and leftist apologists would have it, by the non-Muslims against whom it is directed. In our morally confused world, Spain, Israel and America are blamed for having their men, women and children blown up: What did these countries do to arouse such enmity among otherwise tolerant Arabs and Muslims?

Palestinian terror provides the answer. About 25 percent of Palestinians are Christian, yet if there are any Palestinian Christian suicide bombers, I am unaware of them. Now why is that? Don't Muslim and leftist apologists incessantly tell us that the reason for Palestinian terror is "Israeli occupation and oppression"? Why, then, are there no Palestinian Christian terrorists? Are Christian Palestinians less occupied? . . .

Second, despite the Spanish cave-in to terror, in the long run, terror doesn't work. By any rational calculation, to take the Palestinian example, it has become the most self-destructive policy Palestinians could pursue. Palestinian terror has convinced almost all Israelis outside of academia that the moral gulf between them and the Palestinians is so wide that there is presently no hope for peace. . . .

Third, there is a terrible long-term price that Muslims, Arabs and Palestinians in particular are paying for the minority that engages in terror and for the majority that says nothing about it or supports it. . . .

Just as the German nation, fairly or not, has had to grapple with the moral legacy of Nazism, and the name of Christianity still suffers (unfairly) because of medieval persecutions of non-Christians, so, too, Islam, Arabs and Palestinians will have to struggle for generations to shed their identification with murdering innocents.

While it is Americans, Israelis and other targets of terror who most suffer individually from Palestinian and other Muslim terror, those with the most to lose are Palestinians, Arabs and Islam.

Sowell on Fixing the Jury System

Thomas Sowell: Fixing the jury system

If we are serious about wanting justice in our courts, then we need to start getting serious about preventing witnesses and jurors from being intimidated. We might start by getting all cameras out of the courtroom.

There is no reason why the identity of the jurors has to be known by the media. The whole jury could be put behind one-way glass, so that they can see the proceedings but cannot be seen. It can be made a felony to publish their names.

The requirement for unanimous jury verdicts is long overdue for reconsideration. One pig-headed juror can cause not only a costly mistrial but also verdicts that do not reflect the seriousness of the crime. . . .

The time is also long overdue to reconsider the current practice of having jurors selected with vetoes by the lawyers in the case. When prospective jurors are given 30-page questionnaires made up by lawyers, asking intrusive questions about their personal lives and beliefs, the situation has gotten completely out of hand. . . .

Anonymous jurors, selected by lottery, and not restricted to unanimous verdicts, should be good enough for anyone in an inherently imperfect world. In such a system, cranks and ideologues would not have nearly the leverage that they do now.

There could also be professional jurors, trained in the law, for cases involving complex legal issues. That would cost more -- or rather, the cost would be visible in money, rather than hidden in the corruption of the legal system, the way it is now.

Bartlett on Relative Taxation

Bruce Bartlett: Who pays the taxes?

Looking at the share of taxes paid shows a similar pattern. From 1984 to 2001, those in the bottom quintile reduced their share of the total tax burden from 2.4 percent to 1.1 percent. Those in the top quintile saw their share rise from 55.6 percent to 65.3 percent. Among the ultra wealthy, the top 10 percent increased their share from 39.3 percent to 50 percent, the top 5 percent raised their share from 28.2 percent to 38.5 percent, and that of those in the top 1 percent went up from 14.7 percent to 22.7 percent.

In short, the poor paid half as much of the federal tax burden in 2001 as they did in 1984, while the rich paid about 50 percent more. Those in the middle paid about a third less.

One would think that those on the left would be happy about this trend. Instead, they constantly demagogue the wealthy as deadbeats unwilling to bear their "fair share" of the tax burden, and berate the Bush tax cuts for having "slashed" taxes for the wealthy, while the rest of us pay more. As is so often the case, the truth is exactly the opposite of that portrayed in the liberal worldview.

4/05/2004

PC EU Anti-Semitism Report

The summery of a major EU report on Anti-Semitism is redacted to show that disaffected white youths commit the majority of the anti-Semitic crimes in the EU - despite that fact that the body of the report contradicts that assertion.

EU 'covered up' attacks on Jews by young Muslims

But most of the report focuses on Jew-baiting by Muslim youths. It paints an alarming picture of daily life for France's 600,000 Jews, the EU's biggest community.

In schools, Jewish children are beaten with impunity, and teachers dare not talk about the Holocaust for fear of provoking Muslim pupils, it said.

Britain, which saw a 75 per cent rise in incidents last year, was gently rebuked for hesitating to take "politically awkward" measures against Islamic radicals.

"The government is very anxious not to upset the Muslim community," the report said.

Kos Kerfuffle and Stoller's Comments

Blogger Matt Stoller has some interesting thoughts on the whole Daily Kos "Screw 'Em" kerfuffle.

This bit, however, caught my attention.

When Mainstream Political Kibitzing Comes Online

Because normal political speech is now part and parcel of the pseudo-scandal industry, we are currently in political crisis mode where communications is becoming impossible. It's not that there's too much information; it's that there's too much spin with too much ammo. Just as an increasing amount of cultural product is becoming regulable because it's moving online, so too is there now an unlimited amount of information that you can connect to any political movement. No doubt, three clicks away from GeorgeWBush.com lies some nutty neo-Nazi site, and the same goes for JohnKerry.com. A media that won't differentiate between what the candidate says and who the candidate is near can't effectively describe modern democracy, because in the online political world, everyone is three clicks away. The only check upon the political pseudo-scandal industry, the inability to find damaging information to link to a candidate, is now gone.

Stoller seems to be implying that there is something wrong with having information, and the ability to comment on it, adding your own opinion and analysis (pejoratively referred to as "spinning"). Or maybe it is just that too many have the opportunity to do so ("it's that there's too much spin with too much ammo")? Or is it that a few people express their opinion and analysis too often or with too large an audience? Or even that it's too easy to "spin" info in such a way that it connects to a campaign?

Would he think it wrong of someone to say that Bush is wrong for linking to a site that harbors Neo-Nazi sentiments? Of course the Bush campaign would not do so directly, but what if it were second or third hand? Wouldn't Stoller expect, rightfully so, the Bush campaign to either

delink from the further referring site or
convince the site they link to to delink the offending site?

Seems only natural to hold them accountable for this sort of thing. As a conservative who finds such sentiments reprehensible and wrong, I would be in the front of the parade to convince Bush to repudiate the attachment.

Just as I would find Bush absent malice if his campaign did delink from such a site, I do not think for a moment that Kerry's campaign supports Kos' statements based on their immediate renunciation upon hearing what Kos had said. Bravo on them!

Stoller is right that the MEDIA should differentiate between the candidate and sites linked to linked to linked to sites. But websites on which the candidate DIRECTLY ADVERTISES must be held accountable by the candidate.

The candidate should be given a chance to repudiate statements with which he or she disagrees. If the candidate refuses to do so and continues to advertise despite the content therein, the candidate should be held accountable for all the content on those sites.

Given a chance to repudiate incorrect, wrong, even evil sentiments, candidates who refuse to do so implicitly (or worse, explicitly) support those ideas.

In the end, it is not the blogsphere that would sully a campaign, but rather a campaign that sullies itself by not disavowing comments made by sites on which they chose to advertise.

4/04/2004

Dean - J'Accuse

Dean, the man behind the Watergate problems if you believe a different conspiracy theory (Silent Coup), accuses the Bush administration of being lying liars who lie and are secret.

Telegraph | News | Bush's administration is worse than Nixon's, says Watergate aide

"Bush and [Vice-President Richard] Cheney are a throwback to the Nixon time," Mr Dean, 65, told The Telegraph last night. "All government business is filtered through a political process at this White House, which is the most secretive ever to run the United States.

"This is not in the public's interest. It's in the White House's interest, and the interest of Bush's re-election. The White House is being run like a private business, with the difference that it is not accountable to the shareholders - in this case the voters."

Libs Can't Read?

I was listening briefly to Air America just now, approx. 1:40 PM 4-04-04. The host, I think it's "Randi Rhodes" (I think that's what they said, if someone knows differently, please let me know and I'll correct this attribution) has just said, in essence: this book (American Dynasty) might be a bit high-level for her listeners to read. They haven't read a book, you see. So maybe this might be too much for them to understand when starting to read about the Bush family. (Everything after the colon is her direct sentiment - not in quotes because I could not get the exact wording, but this is pretty close to what she said.)

Pretty funny - a liberal who believes that the Left's constituency is ignorant, unread, and cannot even understand the concepts of the Far Left's whacky conspiracy theories if they did not have far-left-wing conspiracy theorists to explain it to them in simple words (and had to read it for themselves).

Also, as I have been typing this out, in the background the host and her guest have kept talking. Seems like they are discussing the Bush's plans to create chaos in the Middle East so as to bring about the end times demanded by their (the Bush's) fundamentalist faith.

Click the link at the top of this page and you can listen to this stuff for yourself.

KEEP TALKING AIR AMERICA - you're the most potent force the right has found yet to convert people to conservative views. ;-)

4/02/2004

World Anger, Oh My!

BTW - You do know that James Lileks has one of the funniest sites on the web, right? It's the Gallery of Regrettable Food. Too funny! Support great bloggers like James and buy his book.

Lileks on World Anger

I mean, there are countless numbers of things that we could be doing to enhance the world's view of us and to minimize the kind of anger and ... almost recruitment that has taken place in terrorist organizations as a result of the way the administration has behaved.

And that’s the second money quote, right there. We stopped pretending we would ratify Kyoto. We only spent $15 billion on AIDS in Africa. We did not take dictation from Paris. If we had done these things, it would minimize the world’s anger.

Is the world angry at Russia, which spends nothing on AIDS and rebuffed Kyoto? Is the world angry at China, which got a pass on Kyoto and spends nothing on AIDS for other countries?

Is the world angry at North Korea for killings its people? Angry at Iran for smothering that vibrant nation with corrupt and thuggish mullocracy? Angry at Syria for occupying Lebanon? Angry at Saudi Arabia for its denial of women’s rights? Angry at Russia for corrupt elections? Is the world angry at China for threatening Taiwan, or angry at France for joining the Chinese in joint military exercises that threatened the island on the eve of an election? Is the world angry at Zimbabwe for stealing land and starving people? Is the world angry at Pakistan for selling nuclear secrets? Is the world angry at Libya for having an NBC program?

Is the world angry at the thugs of Fallujah?

Is the world angry at anyone besides America and Israel?

Boortz on the Internet and the UN: a Love Story

The Internet and the UN: a Love Story

As in "the UN would LOVE to get its hands on control of the Internet." This is something everyone reading this should be concerned about.

Once control is ceded to the UN, they will be able to do things like shut down Blogger and Blogspot. Why? Because many people who use these sites promote ideas antithetical to UN principles and goals.

Do YOU truly want to leave your access to information in the hands of a group that kicked the US off the Human Rights committee while allowing Libya and Syria to sit on, and even HEAD, same? Yeah, that's a group with it's priorities straight and they would NEVER consider doing something to restrict US citizens.

These are the same folks who want to ban handguns . . . EVERYWHERE for EVERYONE. Exceptions made only for gov'ts.

Kofi's Internet

To be sure, the UN Human Rights Declaration offers lip-service to basic freedoms. Article 19 reads: “Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.”

So, Boortz, how in the world can you say that the UN would initiate a campaign to control Internet content when its own Human Rights Declaration guarantees the freedom to “impart information and ideas through any media and regardless to frontiers.”

Grab your handy copy of the Declaration and read on … read on to Article 29. Section 3. No … wait. I’ll just print it here for you to read: “These rights and freedoms may in no case be exercised contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations.”

Well, so much for Article 19. It seems your right to freedom of opinion and expression is wholly dependent on just whatever the purposes and principles of the United Nations might be at that particular time. And this is Bill Clinton’s idea of the best document ever written promoting the idea of human freedom? Has he never read something called the Declaration of Independence?

The United Nations is no friend of freedom .. and its eyes are on your Internet. If operational control of this fantastic source of information is ever transferred to the United Nations you can rest assured that Article 29, Section 3 will be used to destroy what we enjoy so much today.

Bozell on Priorities

Brent Bozell: Terrorism, a Clinton priority?

Or she could have responded with a list of the real Clinton foreign policy priorities:

1. Maintaining Clinton's approval ratings. This would include ineffective military strikes on terrorist targets and pharmaceutical factories, transparently timed to shift the news media's attention away from inconvenient topics like impeachment and lying under oath about sexual sloppiness.

2. Building Clinton's legacy and his chances for a Nobel Peace Prize. This would include ruling out any U.S. response to the killing of Americans on the U.S.S. Cole, since it might have jeopardized Clinton's end-of-term Middle East "peace" partnership with Yasser Arafat.

3. Globe-trotting apologies for everything America has done in its history, real or imagined. This correlates to No. 2, see: Nobel Prize, pandering for.

4. Broadening "national security" to include panicked theorizing about global warming from cattle flatulence and other imminent threats. Al Gore told Clinton Earth was hanging in the balance.

5. Fighting the bad guys with that intimidating tool, the treaty designed to ban weapons and weapons testing. Let's not forget how this exercise in Realpolitik affected North Korea. They signed a treaty with Clinton to end weapons development in exchange for aid, which it began violating with impunity about two minutes later.

6. Shaping military-technology export policy to fit the demands of campaign contributors, both domestic and the illegal foreign kind.

At the very least, the National Security Advisor could have reminded Mr. Brokaw that President Clinton was so anti-anti-terrorism that he let members of the Puerto Rican terror group FALN out of prison in 1999. (This group was best known for their bombing of New York's historic Fraunces Tavern in 1975, killing four and wounding 60.) The move was so politically tin-eared that the Senate voted 95-2 to call Clinton's clemency "deplorable." Interestingly enough, Tom Brokaw didn't cover that vote.

In November of 1999, a White House memo surfaced showing Clinton counsel Charles Ruff was urged to add his support for FALN clemency to help Al Gore's political aspirations: "The VP's Puerto Rican position would be helped" by the clemency. Brokaw didn't cover that story, either. . . .

How, after punishing the Bush White House for years for supposedly squashing civil liberties and generally acting too aggressively in the War on Terror, can you turn around and completely bash their failure to pass the Patriot Act or attack Afghanistan sooner? . . .

But worse than this shooting bullets at Bushies from every direction is the annual compounding of historical ignorance on the real Clinton record. Not only did the networks avoid the dithering failures and craven political calculations as they unfolded, but now they're repainting the Clintonistas as vigilant comic-book heroes who make Bush look weak and apathetic by comparison. That's not just prevarication. That's hallucination.

Improving Iraq

Jeff Jacoby: What has gone right in Iraq

"As the dogs of war slouch towards Baghdad, we need to be reminded that as many as 2 million refugees could become a reality, as well as half a million fatalities."

Writing on the left-wing website AlterNet last March, senior editor Tai Moses dreaded the coming of a war that "could create more than a million refugees in Iraq and neighboring countries." The BBC, citing a "confidential" UN document, predicted that up to 500,000 Iraqis would be seriously injured during the first phase of an American attack, while 1 million would flee the country and 2 million more would be internally displaced -- all compounded by an "outbreak of diseases in epidemic if not pandemic proportions." The Organization of the Islamic Conference foresaw the "displacement of hundreds of thousands of refugees," plus "total destruction and a humanitarian tragedy whose scale cannot be predicted."

Wrong, every one of them, along with all the other doomsayers, Bush-haters, "Not In Our Name" fanatics, and sundry "peace" activists who flooded the streets and the airwaves to warn of onrushing disaster. How many have had the integrity to admit that their visions of catastrophe were wildly off the mark? Or that if they had gotten their way, the foremost killer of Muslims alive today -- Saddam -- would still be torturing children before their parents' eyes? Instead they chant, "Bush lied, people died," and seize on every setback in Iraq as proof that they were right all along. . . .

Nearly a year after the fall of Baghdad, Iraq is hugely improved. Unemployment has been cut in half. Wages are climbing. The devastated southern marshlands are being restored. More Iraqis own cars and telephones than before Saddam was ousted. Some 2,500 schools have been rehabbed by the US-headed coalition. Spending on health care has soared thirtyfold, and millions of Iraqi children have been vaccinated. Iraqi athletes, no longer terrorized by Saddam's sadistic son Uday, are training for the summer Olympics in Greece.

Above all, Iraq's people are free. The horror and cruelty of the Saddam era are gone forever. In the 12 months since the American and British troops arrived, not one body has been added to a secret mass grave. Not one woman has been raped on government orders. Not one dissident has been mauled to death by trained killer dogs. Not one Kurdish village has been gassed.

Is everything rosy? Of course not. Could the transition to constitutional democracy still fail? Yes. Do innocent victims continue to die in horrific terror attacks, or at the hands of lynch mobs like the one that dragged the corpses of four Americans through the streets of Falluja this week? They do.

But none of that changes the bottom line: In the ancient land that America liberated, life is more beautiful and hopeful than it has been in many decades. Bush's foes may loudly deny it, but the refugees streaming homeward know better.

Two on Condi and the Commission

Linda Chavez: The Commission

The president's decision to send National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice to testify publicly, under oath, before the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks is not likely to quell the furor sparked by former White House terrorism expert Richard Clarke's testimony before the panel last week. Clarke's testimony, which accused President Bush of ignoring the terrorist threat to this nation prior to the 9/11 attack, has so politicized and poisoned the commission's work, it is doubtful it can be salvaged. Thanks to Clarke, the commission has become just another forum for partisan bickering, score-settling and finger-pointing. . . .

It's easy to say that these members can put aside partisanship in the national interest -- but it is a great deal more difficult to do. This commission should not have been bipartisan but rigorously non-partisan. It is too late to fix now; the damage has already been done. The real tragedy is that we may never learn the necessary lessons from our past intelligence and policy failures to prevent future ones from occurring -- and costing American lives.

I still do not agree that Condi Rice should testify before the Commission, but Greenberg's column is worth readin anyway.

Paul Greenberg: 'Condoleeza Rice, do you swear...'

Harry Truman would understand the problem. He was once asked to testify before a congressional committee about what he knew about Communists in government and when he knew it.

In his pithy way, Mr. Truman summed up the reasons any president would have for declining a summons from Congress. The separation of powers "would be shattered, and the president, contrary to our fundamental theories of constitutional government, would become a mere arm of the legislative branch of the government if he would feel during his term of office that his every act might be subject to official inquiry and possible distortion for political purposes."

Mr. Truman was in good company. The doctrine of executive privilege is almost as old as the Constitution itself, and flows naturally from it. The privilege has been invoked by presidents going back to George Washington in 1796. Among others who've cited it were Presidents Jefferson, Monroe, Jackson, Tyler, Polk, Fillmore, Buchanan, Lincoln, Grant, Hayes, Cleveland, both Roosevelts, Coolidge and Hoover. And, in more recent times, Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton. . . .

The commission's hearings already had taken on a partisan cast, and a bitter debate-by-sound bite was taking place between Dick Clarke, the star witness for the prosecution, and Condi Rice, who was playing defense. All this hullabaloo had obscured the commission's early findings, namely that both the Bush and Clinton administrations had failed to act effectively against the gathering danger. Not just civility but perspective was being lost. Perhaps now the air can be cleared. But only if all concerned act responsibly - and remember that there's a war on, not just a presidential election.

Three Stories on Outsourcing

Jacob Sullum: Work Ethics

In any case, a job lost because of foreign competition is no more of a misfortune than a job lost because of productivity-boosting technology. Neither is it a stronger justification for crying foul and demanding the sort of government intervention that John Kerry seems to be contemplating when he promises to review all free trade agreements and faults President Bush's "secret plan to send more American jobs overseas."

That "secret plan" is neither secret nor a plan. As N. Gregory Mankiw, Bush's chief economic adviser, noted in February, it is simply "the latest manifestation of the gains from trade that economists have talked about" since Adam Smith: "When a good or service is produced more cheaply abroad, it makes more sense to import it than to make or provide it domestically."

In this light, Mankiw said, "Outsourcing is just a new way of doing international trade. More things are tradable than were tradable in the past, and that's a good thing."

Bruce Bartlett: Fighting back on outsourcing

A new study from the respected economic forecasting firm, Global Insight, found that the total number of jobs lost to IT outsourcing last year was only 104,000. This amounts to just 2.8 percent of IT jobs in the U.S. A much larger number were lost due to unrelated factors, including the collapse of the dot-com boom in 2000, the recession, and rising productivity.

The most important finding of the Global Insight study is that the cost savings from outsourcing don't just flow into higher corporate profits. They contribute significantly to higher output in the U.S., which leads to job increases elsewhere in the economy. The study estimates that the gross domestic product was $34 billion higher last year because of outsourcing and that this created over 90,000 net new jobs. These figures will continue to rise in future years. By 2008, GDP will be $124 billion higher and the number of new jobs created by outsourcing will rise to 317,000.

It's important to recognize that these new jobs are almost entirely outside IT. According to Global Insight, the largest beneficiary is construction, which will gain 75,757 net new jobs due to outsourcing. Other industrial gainers are transportation and utilities (63,513), education and health services (47,260), and wholesale trade (43,359).

Additional benefits of outsourcing are lower inflation, lower interest rates and higher real wages, which flow to all Americans. Global Insight gets these results because it looks at the ripple effects of outsourcing throughout the entire U.S. economy and not just on IT, as other studies often do.

Federal Reserve Governor Ben Bernanke also emphasizes the broader economic benefits of trade and outsourcing. The narrow focus on jobs tends to be misleading, he says, because much of the payoff accrues to consumers in the form of lower prices. Moreover, careful economic analysis has shown no relationship between jobs and trade in the aggregate. "There is little basis for blaming the recent poor employment performance on import competition," Bernanke concludes.

Faced with the reality that there was nothing they could do about outsourcing even if they wanted to, Republicans are slowly going on the offensive. Greg Mankiw was once again allowed to speak publicly. His colleague on the CEA, Kristin Forbes, made a forceful defense of free trade. And Treasury Secretary John Snow even spoke out in defense of outsourcing. It may not be enough to reverse the tide of public opinion, but it's a start.

The Heritage Foundation: Ten Myths about Jobs and Outsourcing

Myth #1: America is losing jobs.
Fact: More Americans are employed than ever before.

Myth #2: The low unemployment rate excludes many discouraged workers.
Fact: Unemployment is dropping, despite a surging labor force.

Myth #3: Outsourcing will cause a net loss of 3.3 million jobs.
Fact: Outsourcing has little net impact, and represents less than 1 percent of gross job turnover.

Myth #4: Free trade, free labor, and free capital harm the U.S. economy.
Fact: Economic freedom is necessary for economic growth, new jobs, and higher living standards.

Myth #5: A job outsourced is a job lost.
Fact: Outsourcing means efficiency.

Myth #6: Outsourcing is a one-way street.
Fact: Outsourcing works both ways.

Myth #7: American manufacturing jobs are moving to poor nations, especially China.
Fact: Nations are losing manufacturing jobs worldwide, even China.

Myth #8: Only greedy corporations benefit from outsourcing.
Fact: Everyone benefits from outsourcing.

Myth #9: The government can protect American workers from outsourcing.
Fact: Protectionism is isolationism and has a history of failure.

Myth #10: Unemployment benefits should be extended beyond 26 weeks.
Fact: Jobless benefits are already working

Conclusion

America's workers deserve a more informative, less partisan debate on outsourcing. The negative impact of outsourcing on the economy and American employment has been greatly exaggerated, and the benefits of outsourcing almost entirely ignored.