High-Level Terrorist says U.S. is "Suffocating" Them

High-Level Terrorist says U.S. is "Suffocating" Them

The real news is AWOL

"By God, this is suffocation!"

That's the quotation of the week -- if not the new year. This exclamation, first reported in The New York Times, expresses the raw frustration of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian-born terror-master believed to be operating in Iraq and long thought to have been a Saddam Hussein-harbored link to Al Qaeda. His frustration is the result of American success in Iraq.

In a document intercepted last month by U.S. officials, the man believed to be Zarqawi bemoans U.S. resolve -- America "has no intention of leaving, no matter how many wounded nor how bloody it becomes" -- and U.S. progress in building an Iraqi security force. "The problem is," he writes, "you end up having an army and police connected by lineage, blood and appearance. When the Americans withdraw ... they get replaced by these agents who are intimately linked to the people of this region." His conclusion? "The Americans will continue to control from their bases, but the sons of the land will be the authority. This is the democracy. We will have no pretexts."

No "pretexts" for violence and anarchy, that is.

Walter Williams on the Cost of Benefits

Walter Williams on the Cost of Benefits

Goodies cost

There're no two ways about it: There are benefits from all the costly federal, state, and local regulations imposed on American businesses. But we must also acknowledge that our federal, state and local regulatory agencies have no jurisdiction in India, China, Southeast Asia, Mexico and Latin America. That means for many products and services, people who are far less productive, in a physical sense, than we are can beat us in the global marketplace.

We all can agree that there's no benefit that's worth any cost. If that weren't true, we'd do damn near anything that has a benefit, and that would include mandating a 5-mile-per-hour speed limit. Why? The benefits would be enormous in terms of the tens of thousands of highway fatalities and injuries avoided. We don't have a 5-mile-per-hour speed limit because we've decided that its benefit is not worth the enormous cost.

As said earlier, competition reveals costs and least-cost methods of production. One need not take a position one way or another on the worthiness of the benefits of regulation to acknowledge that there are costs associated with them. But I think that intelligent decision-making requires that we take their costs into account. It's not intelligent to stick our heads in the sand and deceive ourselves by pretending that others are to blame for our lack of competitiveness in some areas.

. . . In the Sky with Diamonds

. . . In the Sky with Diamonds

My wife is going to be pissed that I did not find out about this in time to get it for her for Valentine's Day. Oh well, maybe next year.

sacbee.com -- AP State Wire News -- Astronomers spy 10 billion trillion trillion-carat diamond

Astronomers spy 10 billion trillion trillion-carat diamond.