The rise of the declinist

Writing in the Ottawa Citizen, Andrew Potter has some interesting observations on the psychology of climate change believers and their common cause with Islamists:

One of the most disturbing aspects of the growing concern over climate change is the giddy delight with which some members of the left await the coming global catastrophe. Of course they don't admit to being delighted. Instead, they claim to be extremely upset about the prospect of melting ice caps, ....

Let us call these people "declinists," and their animating philosophy "declinism." What motivates declinism is an attitude so pessimistic that it is almost theological: not only are things worse than they used to be, but they're getting worse with every passing year.

As the declinist sees it, the rights-based politics of liberal individualism, combined with the free-market economy, have served to undermine local attachments and communitarian feelings, leading us to seek meaning in shallow consumerism and mindless entertainments. ....

That is why climate change is the ultimate declinist wet dream. Sure, there is a long tradition of declinist hobby horses, including overpopulation, the exhaustion of natural resources and the industrial poisoning of the land and the sea, but climate change is the rug that pulls the whole room together. From cars and consumerism to mass travel, fast food and inexpensive lighting, declinism gathers up everything the left dislikes about contemporary society and puts it all in the dock facing the same charge: it is causing the planet to heat up. ....

In its resentment of modernity, the declinist left finds itself in agreement with a broad spectrum of Islamofascists, evangelical nuts and tinfoil-hat anarchists, who equally fear the globalized future and pray for a return to a glorious but thoroughly imaginary past. If it takes a global catastrophe to get us there, so much the better.

The liberal infatuation with predicted disasters was previously discussed here. The infatuation is not new: the first influentual figure in US history to have such a focus on disaster scenarios was Alexander Hamilton.

Potter's declinists see things as getting worse. This is reminiscent of Rousseau's belief in some earlier golden age, after which the human condition declined. Two thousand years earlier, this aspect of the declinist view was advocated by Tacitus who wrote about the perfect world that supposedly existed before civilization:

Primitive man had no evil desires. Being blameless and innocent, his life was free of compulsions or penalties. He also needed no rewards; for he was naturally good. Likewise where no wrong desires existed, fear imposed no prohibitions. But when men ceased to be equal, egotism replaces fellow-feeling and decency succumbs to violence. Despotism results. [from The Annals of Imperial Rome, Chapter 6]

There is no archeological support for such a golden age. It is something the human mind, at least some human minds, want to believe.

Hat tip: Daimnation and TigerHawk.

The game has changed

Commenting at the New York Times, Frank Rich cannot understand why Sen. Clinton kept repeating her tall-tale about landing-in-Bosnia-under-sniper-fire:

Why did she keep repeating this whopper for nearly three months, well after it had been publicly debunked by journalists and eyewitnesses?

Mr. Rich seems unaware that, in the 1990s, the Clintons could repeat lies indefinitely without fear of correction by the 'unbiased' reporters. The problem for Sen. Clinton is that those same reporters now appear instead to be loyal to Sen. Obama.

Mobile phones may be death sentence?

Are mobile phones "more dangerous than smoking or asbestos"? So says Dr Vini Khurana in a study currently being hyped. His claim is that there is a brain cancer risk for long-term, 10 years or more, use of cell phones. This would be important, if true. What is the status of this research? The Independent (UK) writes:

[A] paper based on the research is
currently being peer-reviewed for publication in a scientific journal.

In other words, his claims have not yet gotten through even the first stage of scientific validation. His calling of press conferences to scare the general public on something that has not survived peer review is irresponsible.

Statistical studies claiming to link some action to some disease should never be believed until confirmed by other studies. It is the nature of statistics, discussed in detail here, to go wrong occasionally. If there is a genuine link between 10-years of cell phone exposure and certain malignant brain tumors, it will start to show up consistently in future studies. At the moment, one study links cell phones to one awful disease and the next study links them to some other awful disease. This is exactly the statistical pattern that one would expect if there were no link at all.

The very credibility of the UN

James Taranto writes:

A press release from Geneva-based United Nations Watch brings us this disturbing news:

To the sound of cheers, and by an overhwelming [sic] majority of 40 out of 47 votes, the UN Human Rights Council today elected Jean Ziegler, the co-founder of the "Muammar Khaddafi Human Rights Prize," as an expert advisor representing the Western world. And for its new Palestine expert, the council chose Richard Falk, who, like Ziegler, accuses the U.S. of being responsible for many of the world's ills and describes Israel in Nazi terminology.

"Even within the benighted UN Human Rights council, today was a dark day for human rights," said Hillel Neuer, executive director of UN Watch, a Geneva-based human rights monitoring agency. "The very credibility of the UN human rights system is now at stake."

Yikes! Imagine what the world would be like if the U.N. human rights system lost its credibility. It's almost unthinkable!

Those layers of editors and factcheckers

The Los Angeles Times admits to having been duped:

A Los Angeles Times story about a brutal 1994 attack on rap superstar Tupac Shakur was partially based on documents that appear to have been fabricated, the reporter and editor responsible for the story said Wednesday. ....

"In relying on documents that I now believe were fake, I failed to do my job," Philips said in a statement Wednesday. "I'm sorry."

In his statement, Duvoisin added: "We should not have let ourselves be fooled. That we were is as much my fault as Chuck's. I deeply regret that we let our readers down."

The hoax was discovered the The Smoking Gun website. To add to the embarassment, the LA Times was fooled by a swindler while the swindler was still in prison.

In the LA Times article, notice that there was no fact-checker who apologized: Newspapers do not actually use "fact-checkers."

Useful idiots

From AP:

WASHINGTON (AP) - Saddam Hussein's intelligence agency secretly financed a trip to Iraq for three U.S. lawmakers during the run-up to the U.S.-led invasion, federal prosecutors said Wednesday.

An indictment unsealed in Detroit accuses Muthanna Al-Hanooti, a member of a Michigan nonprofit group, of arranging for three members of Congress to travel to Iraq in October 2002 at the behest of Saddam's regime....

The lawmakers are not named in the indictment but the dates correspond to a trip by Democratic Reps. Jim McDermott of Washington, David Bonior of Michigan and Mike Thompson of California.

After their trip, Rep. McDermott told ABC News that he thought that the Bush administration was full of misinformation but, as for Saddam's Iraq and it compliance with inspections, "I think you have to take the Iraqis on their face value."

In addition paying for his trip, Saddam contributed $5,000 to Rep. McDermott's Legal Defense Fund. His legal needs were related to his role in the wiretapping of a Boehner-Gingrich phone call. A Federal Appeals Court had ordered McDermott to pay Boehner more than $700,000 in damages and fees but the ruling is still being appealed. After it was exposed that Saddam was the source of the donation, McDermott said he returned the $5,000.

UPDATE: McDermott has lost another round:

WASHINGTON (AP) — A federal judge says House Minority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio, can collect more than $1 million in his lawsuit against Democratic Rep. Jim McDermott of Washington state.

Bizarrely, as Michelle Malkin observes, McDermott is trying to spin his big loss as if he was defending the first amendment and had won a victory.

When liberalism kills

In the first quantitative confirmation of the 'emboldenment effect,' a Harvard study finds that media coverage of US war critics leads to increased violence in Iraq.

Hat tip: Instapundit and BotW.

PREVIOUSLY, the violent nature of peace protesters had been noted anecdotally here, and here,.

Was the JFK assassination the turning point?

Edward B. Driscoll Jr. suggests that liberals got "trapped in Camelot" when they couldn't accept that a communist shot JFK and that they subsequently went "off the rails."

However, if one looks back at the 1930's, one sees liberals were praising and apologizing for Mussolini and Hitler. If one looks back at the 1860's, one sees that liberals were taking the wrong side of the civil war. I disagree with Mr. Driscoll: I see no evidence that they ever were on the rails.

Obama's dark outlook

Peggy Noonan watched Sen. Obama's race speech and observed its dark view of life:

Near the end of the speech, Mr. Obama painted an America that didn't summon thoughts of Faulkner but of William Blake. The bankruptcies, the dark satanic mills, the job loss and corporate corruptions. There is of course some truth in his portrait, but why do appeals to the Democratic base have to be so unrelievedly, so unrealistically, bleak?

This connected in my mind to the persistent feeling one has -- the fear one has, actually -- that the Obamas, he and she, may not actually know all that much about America. They are bright, accomplished, decent, they know all about the yuppie experience, the buppie experience, Ivy League ways, networking. But they bring along with all this -- perhaps defensively, to keep their ideological views from being refuted by the evidence of their own lives, or so as not to be embarrassed about how nice fame, success, and power are -- habitual reversions to how tough it is to be in America, and to be black in America, and how everyone since the Reagan days has been dying of nothing to eat, and of exploding untreated diseases. America is always coming to them on crutches.

But most people didn't experience the past 25 years that way. Because it wasn't that way. Do the Obamas know it?

This is a lot of baggage to bring into the Executive Mansion.

Alternatively, this could be interpreted as a just a symptom of the depression that Democrats appear to suffer.

Iraq war anniversary

Last Wednesday, March 19, San Franciscans gathered to display their wit and wisdom:

ProtestShooter has all the details.

Socialism and its lack of calories

Apparently there are some drawbacks to devoting all one's resources to nukes: North Korea's food shortage is worsening and now extends even to party loyalists:

A dire food shortage across North Korea has become so acute it has started to affect the country's elite in the capital, Pyongyang, reports say.

Aid agency Good Friends says food rations for some parts of the city have been cut by up to 60%, while others have seen their supplies cut off completely.

Only citizens who show absolute loyalty to leader Kim Jong Il and his regime are allowed to live in Pyongyang and are considered better off than their fellow countrymen.

But the food situation, which has mostly been felt in rural areas where rations have been suspended since November, has now spread to the city, according to the South Korean aid agency.

"Even ranking officials have run out of their (rationed) food supply, while a ban on (private) trade is strictly maintained," said an unidentified city official quoted by Good Friends.

"It is nothing but a death sentence." ....

A famine gripped North Korea during the 1990s, reportedly killing up to two million people.

The detail about only party loyalists being allowed to live in the capital city is a typical communist policy. The USSR had a similar policy for restricting who could be in Moscow. To enforce the policy, Russians were required to have internal passports which documented where they were allowed to be or to live. (Somehow, in a communist people's paradise, the government has a strong need to control the people.)

During 1958-2961, when Mao forced farmers into communes, China experienced "the worst famine in human history." This was a part of Mao's Great Leap Forward:

To chase their steel production targets, peasants abandoned their harvests and melted their sickles and woks in backyard furnaces. Officials reported that grain production doubled in 1959, when in fact it fell by a quarter. The Communist Party siphoned grain from the countryside, starving peasants were barred from leaving their foodless villages....

What's wrong with the current primary system?

Less than a month ago, so little was known about Sen. Obama that he seemed to be a 'blank slate.' This week, we are beginning to get to know him. We, for example, now know that he takes seriously the views of people who believe that the United States government created the AIDS virus in a laboratory to kill African Americans. Today, he also described the characteristics of the 'typical white person.' (Tell me, dear reader, do you obey the description of 'typical' for your race?) But, the primary season was compressed by a series of states that all wanted to have early primaries. So, what we learn this week is too late to influence the bulk of the primaries: The large states had their primaries before there was reasonable time to investigate the candidates. This is why the primary season needs to stretch over months and why the large states, whose pledged delegates usually decide the nominee, should not vote until months after the smaller states have started voting.

The other problem is campaign finance reform. A series of laws enacted over the past 3+ decades have made fundraising extremely difficult. The result is that (a) candidates must devote most of their time to fundraising, rather than campaigning, and (b) they have to raise a lot of money before the primary season even starts. In previous times, an unknown candidate could do well in Iowa or New Hampshire (where campaigning is cheap) and then raise money before the campaigns in the large (expensive) states even began. The result of the combination of campaign finance reform and the compressed primary season is that no candidate has a chance unless (a) he is personally worth millions, such as Mitt Romney and Steve Forbes, or (b) he has the national stature to raise millions before Iowa.

Why people are nuts

ScienceDaily reports:

Researchers Valerie Reyna, human development professor, and Chuck Brainerd, human development and law school professor--both from Cornell University--argue that like the two-headed Roman god Janus, memory is of two minds--that is, memories are captured and recorded separately and differently in two distinct parts of the mind.

They say children depend more heavily on a part of the mind that records, "what actually happened," while adults depend more on another part of the mind that records, "the meaning of what happened." As a result, they say, adults are more susceptible to false memories, which can be extremely problematic in court cases.....

Fuzzy Trace Theory

Traditional theories of memory assume a person's memories are based on event reconstruction, especially after delays of a few days, weeks, or months. However, Reyna and Brainerd's Fuzzy Trace Theory hypothesizes that people store two types of experience records or memories: verbatim traces and gist traces.

Verbatim traces are memories of what actually happened. Gist traces are based on a person's understanding of what happened, or what the event meant to him or her. Gist traces stimulate false memories because they store impressions of what an event meant, which can be inconsistent with what actually happened.

So, adults use their understanding to interpret what happened (the 'gist') and then are likely to remember only their interpretation, not the events. This might explain why so many people thought Bill Clinton was a good president.

Bravely attacking safe targets, II

Scott Adams explains his decision to write a series of comics 'mocking' Christianity but not Islam:

This week’s series in Dilbert caused quite a stir. It featured a new guy in the office whose name is pronounced hay-soos and spelled Jesus. I drew those strips a few months ago, and in my typical careless way I didn’t realize they would be running around Easter time. Oops.

You can see the series at www.dilbert.com while they are still in the archive.

As you might imagine, I got a lot of e-mail about this strip. Comments were about evenly divided between people who are deeply offended and people who think it was my best work yet. Interestingly, the people most amused often described themselves as religious, and those offended often noted that they were not especially religious.

My favorite rhetorical question, which I received an alarming number of times, was “Why don’t you mock Mohammed next? Huh? Why not?”

Well, aside from the blindingly obvious reason that I prefer life over death, I didn’t realize I was making fun of Christianity this week. [emphasis added]

At least he is honest about it.

PREVIOUSLY, left-liberal self-censorship was discussed here.

Hat tip: Moonbattery.

Liberal fascism

Kos of DailyKos describes his idea of what civil society should be like:

It is Clinton, with no reasonable chance of victory, who is fomenting civil war in order to overturn the will of the Democratic electorate. As such, as far as I'm concerned, she doesn't deserve "fairness" on this site.

To Kos' credit, he does have one limit to the types of unfairness that he will endorse: he opposes "sexist" attacks on Sen. Clinton. Otherwise, it appears that, in the world of DailyKos, it is fair game to be unfair.

Hat tip: LGF

It is only news if it makes Democrats look good

AP reports

The war has nearly vanished from TV screens over the past few months, ....

"It's no big secret that this is a war that everyone has grown tired of," said CNN correspondent Arwa Damon, ....

So when exactly did the media get "tired" of the war:

It's possible to pinpoint the exact week that the switch turned off. The war averaged 30 minutes per week of coverage last year on the three network evening newscasts up until Gen. David Petraeus, commander of the U.S. forces, testified in September about the surge's progress, according to news consultant Andrew Tyndall. In the last 15 weeks of the year, the broadcasts collectively spent four minutes per week on the war.

Yes, CNN and the MSM got "tired" of the story exactly at the time that it became hard to deny that things in Iraq were going well.

Don't question their patriotism

Feddie at Southern Appeal blog tries an experiment:

So, I thought to myself: I wonder what would happen if I published a simple post with an image of the American Flag and the lyrics to God Bless America, and nothing more. Well, the result is nothing short of remarkable; and it is hardly atypical. These folks really loathe their own country.

For what it's worth, he conducted the experiment at a (mostly liberal) Catholic blog, Vox Nova.

Feminist Racism

Feminist Philosopher Jender unwittingly lets her racism show. She begins reasonably:

Geraldine Ferraro has been widely and rightly criticised for saying the following:

“If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position,” she continued. “And if he was a woman (of any color) he would not be in this position. He happens to be very lucky to be who he is. And the country is caught up in the concept.”

She agrees that Ms. Ferraro's statement is factually correct but she objects to its implications (AKA implicatures). Lacking any additional background, and Jender provides none, I had thought it most likely that Ms. Ferraro was objecting to the way the press had treated Mr. Obama, in part because of his race, as a messiah or rock star, to which "the country" had responded, giving him an unfair advantage.

It is not unusual for the press to pick favorites. In 2000, while they still thought he was a liberal Republican, the press treated then Gov. Geo. Bush very positively. Between 2004 and 2008, they treated Sen. Clinton as the 'inevitable' winner of the Democratic presidential nomination. Sen. Obama has merely been the recent beneficiary of media praise. But, feminist philosopher Jender sees it differently:

But– what [Ms. Ferraro] conveyed (via implicatures, if one wants to get technical) was that Obama was undeserving of his successes. That his successes were solely a result of his race. And that being non-white is a huge and undeserved stroke of luck in America. All false. And all so offensive and obviously false that nobody would explicitly say them.

The implications that Jender reads into Ms. Ferraro's statements come from Jender's mind, not Ferraro's. While everyone else acknowledges, for example, that Sen. Obama gives superb political speeches, in Jender's mind, Sen. Obama's successes are "undeserved" and "solely" because of race. Her introduction of the word "solely" is particularly significant: it is no where in Ms. Ferraro's statement nor in any reasonably implication of her statement. Jender's argument appears to me to show Jender projecting her own racist feelings of black inferiority onto Ms. Ferraro.

UPDATE: Shelby Steele argues that Ms. Ferraro was right.

PREVIOUSLY, liberal racism has been addressed here, here, here, and here.

Clinton-supporter discovers liberal spite and anger

Over at DailyKos, writer Alegre discovers the nature of his side of the blogosphere:

This is an open letter to the progressive blogosphere...

I’ve been posting at DailyKos for nearly 4 years now and started writing diaries in support of Hillary Clinton back in June of last year. Over the past few months I’ve noticed that things have become progressively more abusive toward my candidate and her supporters.

I’ve put up with the abuse and anger because I’ve always believed in what our on-line community has tried to accomplish in this world. No more. DailyKos is not the site it once was thanks to the abusive nature of certain members of our community.

I’ve decided to go on "strike" and will refrain from posting here as long as the administrators allow the more disruptive members of our community to trash Hillary Clinton and distort her record without any fear of consequence or retribution....

Sadly, the majority of the administrators have allowed this hostile environment to develop in our online community for anyone who isn’t planted firmly in the Obama camp. They've routinely ignored personal attacks and allowed disruptive, spam-like posts to go unchecked....

No, I won’t post specific attacks here. That would just be repeating the lies and the hate,....

Do the venomous attacks and lies about fellow Democrats represent [Sen. Obama] and all he stands for in an accurate and fair manner? Does this spiteful and vindictive behavior reunite our party? [emphasis added]

The anger and spite may be regarded as symptoms of the depression which polling shows that Democrats are more prone to suffer.

Hat tip: LGF.

Cuba to allows PCs but not internet

Reuters claims that the Cuban government is relinquishing control:

HAVANA (Reuters) - Communist Cuba has authorized the unrestricted
sale of computers and DVD and video players in the first sign that its
new president, Raul Castro, is moving to improve Cubans' access to
consumer goods.

An internal government memo seen by Reuters on Thursday said the
appliances long desired by Cubans can go on sale immediately, although
air conditioners will not be available until next year and toasters
until 2010....

While they will now be able to buy computers, access to the Internet remains controlled by the government.

The average monthly per capita income in Cuba is $10.

Is Hillary Klan-like?

Charles Krauthammer writes of the modern hate-mongers:

The pillars of American liberalism -- the Democratic Party, the universities and the mass media -- are obsessed with biological markers, most particularly race and gender. They have insisted, moreover, that pedagogy and culture and politics be just as seized with the primacy of these distinctions and with the resulting "privileging" that allegedly haunts every aspect of our social relations.

They have gotten their wish. This primary campaign represents the full flowering of identity politics. It's not a pretty picture. Geraldine Ferraro says Obama is where he is only because he's black. Professor Orlando Patterson says the 3 a.m. phone call ad is not about a foreign policy crisis but a subliminal Klan-like appeal to the fear of "black men lurking in the bushes around white society."

The growing madness

Paul Krugman, the former Enron adviser and quite liberal NYT columnist, writes about the liberal hypersensitivity to perceived slights:

One measure of how crazy people on at least one side of the Democratic nomination struggle have become: I’ve gotten a number of complaints that the end of my last — entirely non-political — column, “hope is not a plan,” was a swipe at Obama.

Um, guys, it’s a phrase military types use; I started using it a lot when Iraq went pear-shaped. In fact, if you Google it, the first entry that comes up is a book about the Iraq war.

I’m sorry to say that a large part of the progressive movement seems to have lost its sanity.

Big-spending Republicans

Sen. DeMint (R-NC) has propsed a moratium on earmarks (AKA pork barrel spending). Sen. Obama is also supporting earmark reform. The WSJ writes:

Mr. Obama raised the eyebrows of more than a few Democratic colleagues when he announced this week that Congress' "earmark culture" was broken and "needs to be re-examined and reformed." Republican Senate leaders now are in danger of being outflanked unless they step up the pace and embrace the DeMint moratorium themselves. Yet the Hill newspaper reports that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell is delaying any statement on earmarks until a task force he appointed two months ago to study the subject reports back to him. Missouri Republican Kit Bond isn't on the task force but had a succinct summary description of the moratorium idea: "Stupid." Statements like that have spending foes worrying that the task force is simply designed to punt on reform.

If true, then with leaders like Sen. McConnell and Sen. Bond, the Republican's loss of control in congress was well-deserved.

What is the victim status of your identity group?

Maureen Dowd explains how Democrats should choose between Senators Obama and Clinton:

People will have to choose which of America’s sins are greater, and which stain will have to be removed first. Is misogyny worse than racism, or is racism worse than misogyny?

Apparently, for Ms. Dowd, Senators Obama and Clinton should not be evaluated as individuals because identity politics trumps all.

UPDATE: The group victim status debate continues at 'Feminist Philosphers' blog which writes:

Katha Pollitt endorses a view close to a problematic one of Gloria Steinem’s; namely, that sexism in the USA is worse than racism. We’ve discussed this claim before; it should be rejected.

PREVIOUSLY, Democrats have used group identity to decide guilt or innocence in legal cases while feminist Kate Michelman struggled with then overcame her identity issues to vote for Obama.

Hat tip: Pickerhead

Projecting hate onto other liberals

Rand Simberg writes:

I have to be amused at the charges being flung in the presidential race between the two identity-politics-based campaigns of Obama and Clinton. Her people say that Obama's campaign is behaving "like Ken Starr." His people say that they're using "Republican" tactics. All of this projection is hilarious, since it is the Clintons who refined the "politics of personal destruction" to a high art, particularly when it came to destroying anyone with the temerity to tell the truth about them.

Poor Gerry Ferraro is now being pilloried for stating an obvious truth--that Barack Obama wouldn't have a prayer of almost having the Democrat nomination sewed up if his skin had a lower melanin content. I listened to her this morning, having to defend herself against accusations of racism. The delicious irony, of course, is not that they're "acting like Republicans." No, what's really happening is that they're behaving toward each other the way Democrats and the left have always behaved toward Republicans--accusing them of "hate" when they simply want people to obey the law, accusing them of "racism" when they want the law to be color blind, accusing them of "fascism" if they oppose the latest "liberal" fascist project.

And funny thing, they don't seem to like this kind of treatment any more than Republicans have enjoyed it when they've been on the receiving end for decades. But I doubt that they'll take any lessons from it.

Hat tip: Instapundit

Are the presidential candidates merely out-of-control children?

From Scott Whitlock at Newsbusters:

On Friday's "Good Morning America," George Stephanopoulos appeared and pleaded for calm in the increasingly contentious battle between Senators Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. The ABC journalist and former top aide to Bill Clinton proclaimed, "Well, the bottom line is that it's time for a time-out."

PREVIOUSLY, Sen. Clinton proposed timeouts as an economic policy.

Iraq's experience with religious extremism

From interviews with young Iraqis:

“I hate Islam and all the clerics because they limit our freedom every day and their instruction became heavy over us,” said Sara Sami, a high school student in Basra. “Most of the girls in my high school hate that Islamic people control the authority because they don’t deserve to be rulers.”

Atheer, a 19-year-old from a poor, heavily Shiite neighborhood in southern Baghdad, said: “The religion men are liars. Young people don’t believe them. Guys my age are not interested in religion anymore.”

And then there is this:

“I used to love Osama Bin Laden,” proclaimed a 24-year-old Iraqi college student. She was referring to how she felt before the war took hold in her native Baghdad. The Sept. 11, 2001, strike at American supremacy was satisfying, and the deaths, abstract. ...

“Now I hate Islam,” she said, sitting in her family’s unadorned living room in central Baghdad. “Al Qaeda and the Mahdi Army are spreading hatred. People are being killed for nothing.”

Strata-Sphere has much more.

Democrats and taxes

You may remember that when Bill Clinton was selecting the US Attorney General, the person who enforces our laws, he had a hard finding a candidate who hadn't cheated on her taxes (Zoe Baird and KimbaM. Wood). New York State is pursuing Al Franken for a $25,000 penalty over allegedly unpaid worker's compensation insurance. Mr. Franken is campaigning for the Democratic nomination for US Senate from Minnesota. PowerLine notes a previous Democratic Minnesota senator, and liberal champion of the little guy, Paul Wellstone failed to pay for worker's compensation insurance for his employees including the four who needed it when they died with him in his tragic plane crash.

USS Cole attack: alleged traitor on now on trial

From the Investigative Project on Journalism:

Months after the October 2000 attack on the USS Cole that killed 17 American sailors docked in Yemen, a battle group led by the USS Constellation prepared to sail for the Persian Gulf. ....

Unbeknownst to Navy leadership, a signalman on the destroyer Benfold was in direct communication at the time with a British-based publishing house openly supporting the Taliban and jihadi movements. ....

Jurors are deliberating the fate of that sailor, Hassan Abu-Jihaad, who stands accused of providing material support to terrorists and of leaking information about the Constellation battle group's deployment to people devoted to killing Americans. British authorities found the plans on a floppy disk in a bedroom drawer of an Azzam Publications official in 2003. Babar Ahmad directed Azzam Publications, which marketed the videos purchased by Abu-Jihaad, along with a series of related websites.The plans included a tentative date when the battle group would pass through the narrow Straits of Hormuz and the claim that "They have nothing to stop a small craft with RPG etc. except their Seals' stinger missiles." Finally, it said, "Please destroy message."

UPDATE: He was convicted.

After enduring SNL mockery, the media start to do their job

Reagan observed in his diary that the local press often asked much more intelligent questions that the national media. It took the local press to ask Sen. Obama his first difficult questions, as MSNBC reports:

From NBC/NJ’s Aswini Anburajan
SAN ANTONIO, Texas -- Led by the Chicago press corps that has covered Obama for years, the candidate today faced a barrage of questions in what turned out to be a contentious news conference.

Questions centered on why his campaign had denied that a meeting occurred between his chief economic advisor and Canadian officials as well as questions on his relationship with Tony Rezko, a Chicago land developer and fast food magnate, now on trial for corruption charges.

Ed Morrissey contrasts Obama's performance with McCain's:

It appears that the local press has managed to do what the national media could not — treat Obama as a politician and not a secular messiah. They asked tough questions about Obama’s political connections to a fixer and his campaign’s outright false answers on an Obama adviser’s contacts with Canadian diplomats regarding Obama’s rhetoric on NAFTA. Instead of handling the questions calmly and patiently, Obama accused the media of having an agenda against him, and then angrily stalked off.

Compare this to the press conference John McCain held after the New York Times smeared him by accusing him of having a sexual affair with a lobbyist. Not only did McCain — whose temper has its own zip code, according to some Capitol Hill staffers — give a lengthy and reserved statement, but then stood at the podium until the reporters ran out of questions. In fact, at the end, McCain had to ask twice whether anyone had anything else to ask him before leaving the podium.

By my count, McCain answered 36 questions in this press conference. How many did Obama take before walking off in a huff?

Many people profess concern that McCain lacks the proper temperament for the presidency. Instead, they should wonder just how a President Obama would deal with the press and with the accountability that comes with the office. If today’s press conference gives any indication, it looks like Obama has some temper and judgment issues of his own — or that the questions strike a little too close to home.

Powerline has some video. Dana Milbank at the Washington Post offers a theory for what caused the media to ask its first serious questions of Sen. Obama:

SAN ANTONIO It took many months and the mockery of "Saturday Night Live" to make it happen, but the lumbering beast that is the press corps finally roused itself from its slumber Monday and greeted Barack Obama with a menacing growl.

Sen. Obama has the strong chance of being the next US president and only now, toward the close of the primary season, has anyone in the media has asked him any tough questions.

Good for the environment?

Go to Moonbattery to see Penn and Teller explain recycling.

Left-wing terrorists suspected of arson attack

The AFP reports:

Pre-dawn fires destroyed four new homes in
an upscale Seattle suburb Monday, local officials said, with
environmental extremists reportedly suspected of arson.

"There
were no reported injuries in the three-alarm blaze that started around
4:00 am local time Monday," Snohomish County fire department official
Rick Eastman told AFP.

"Some of the houses were still under construction."

The multi-million-dollar homes went up in flames in the "Street of
Dreams" development near Woodinville, in northwest Washington state.

Local media reported that the fire chief found signs with the initials
of the Earth Liberation Front at the scene, and explosives were
reportedly used to start the blaze.

The FBI has classified the Earth Liberation Front as a "domestic terror group" since 2002. It is said to be sister group to the Animal Liberation Front.

Democrats outraged over media bias

Sen. Clinton's supporters see bias:

DALLAS (AP) - The founder of a prestigious institute on media and politics added his voice Saturday to the chorus of complaint over perceived press bias in favor of Democrat Barack Obama.

Walter Shorenstein, a prominent San Francisco-based real estate developer, Democratic fundraiser and longtime supporter of Hillary Rodham Clinton, penned a memo to Democratic party "superdelegates" and other activists criticizing media coverage of the presidential campaign.

Shorenstein is the founder of the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University. ....

The former first lady and her advisers have lashed out at the press in recent days, suggesting unfair coverage of the campaign has in part led to Obama's victories in the last 11 voting contests. They've encouraged supporters and voters to watch a "Saturday Night Live" skit that aired last weekend, depicting a group of journalists fawning over Obama.

In his memo, Shorenstein concurred with the Clinton campaign's assessment.

"I am absolutely outraged with the media coverage of the presidential campaign," Shorenstein wrote in the memo, which was obtained by The Associated Press. "This is the most important election in my long lifetime, and to quote one of my favorite movies, 'I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore!'" ....

"There is too much on the line for the media to ignore important issues while they obsess about Hillary's hairdo or Barack's baritone," Shorenstein continued. "Is it in the country's best interest that voters received far more information about Hillary's laugh than Obama's legislative record? Is it good for our nation that more attention is paid to the differences in their speaking style than their health care plans?"

While CNN was generally believed to have had a pro-Clinton bias in an early Democratic debate, most of the 'unbiased' news media do currently seem to have a pro-Obama bias.

What the left thinks of peacekeepers

A protester, as seen by Zombietime, in front of the Berkeley Marine recruiting center:

The Jawa Report has more on www.bolshevik.org.

RELATED: Zombietime's hall of shame is here.

FLASHBACK: Zombietime explains how the news media crop photos of protesters in ways that change/cover-up the meaning and significance.