According to Abbasi, the global balance of power is in a state of flux and every nation should fight for a place in a future equilibrium. The Western powers, especially the United States, still wield immense military and economic power that “looks formidable on paper.” But they are unable to use that power because their populations have become “risk-averse.”
“The Western man today has no stomach for a fight,” Abbasi says. “This phenomenon is not new: All empires produce this type of man, the self-centered, materialist, and risk-averse man.”
Abbasi believes that the US intervention in Iraq, which involved “slightly higher risks” than the invasion of Afghanistan, was the very last of its kind. And even then, the US went into Iraq because of President George W Bush’s “readiness to do what no other American leader would dare contemplate.”
This leaves two possibilities. One is that the mission was intended to result in the New York Times oped all along, meaning that the CIA didn't care much about Plame's status, and was trying to meddle in domestic politics. This reflects very badly on the CIA.
The other possibility is that they're so clueless that they did this without any nefarious plan, because they're so inept, and so prone to cronyism and nepotism, that this is just business as usual. If so, the popular theory that the CIA couldn't find its own weenie with both hands and a flashlight would appear to have found some pretty strong support.
Economic activity expanded at an energetic 3.8 percent annual rate in the third quarter, providing vivid evidence of the economy’s stamina even as it coped with the destructive forces of hurricanes Katrina and Rita.
The latest snapshot of the country’s economic performance, released by the Commerce Department on Friday, even marked an improvement from the solid 3.3 percent pace of growth registered in the second quarter.
Growth in the third quarter was broad-based, reflecting brisk spending by consumers, businesses and government.
Economists had forecast GDP would advance at a 3.6% rate in the July-to-September quarter. The economy has now expanded faster than 3% for 10 straight quarters.
So when was the last time the economy expanded faster than 3% for 10 straight quarters?
It didn’t happen during the 1990s (the longest streak was eight).
It last happened during the 13 quarters from 1Q 1983 through 1Q 1986. Not coincidentally, a president who believed in lowering taxes to stimulate economic growth was in charge the last time it happened.
So despite being at war, despite devastating storms, and despite legislative and regulatory drags on the economy like Sarbanes-Oxley, this has been most consistently growing economy in almost 20 years.
Time for the weekly insanity update, where the insane, the bizarre, the ridiculous, and the completely absurd are highlighted for all to see! This has been a week of rare idiocy (as always!). Calling all bloggers! Be sure to send in your entries to the Carnival, which will be posted every Sunday. Entries need to be in by 8 pm on Saturday to make their way into the list that week. Only one post entry per blogger, please. Thanks for all the submissions. SO MANY INSANITIES! SO LITTLE TIME! Here is the Halloween Edition! Be afraid, be very afraid....
This mark is being reached amid growing doubts among the American public about the seemingly endless European and Pacific conflicts, hastily and, some say, thoughtlessly launched in December 1941 to avenge the attack on Pearl Harbor by radical Japanese Shintoists.
Here in the nation's capital, many urged the U.S. Senate to observe a moment of silence in honor of the fallen 250,000.
"We owe them a deep debt of gratitude for their courage, for their valor, for their strength, for their commitment to our country," said a prominent Democrat leader.
Critics of the war also acknowledged the sacrifice, even as they questioned the policies of those who lead it.
Photo Update to the Left: Special Counsel Fitzgerald taking questions from reporters in the aftermath of the Libby indictment.The accusation – from Wilson and his allies – was that there was a conspiracy at the highest levels of this administration to expose Valerie Plame, to reveal that she was an undercover agent. And the accusation was that this was done as a way to punish punish Joe Wilson and to send a chill to all others who might criticize the Bush White House. That does not appear to be the case. Fitzgerald is alleging no such conspiracy. And he even added: “We’re not saying that Libby knowingly outted a covert agent.” So did anybody? Or not? Does it really not matter? I’m asking .
This week's winners in the Watcher's Council are now posted at the Watcher of Weasels. Every week the Council nominates posts from the blogs of the Council members, and posts from around the blogsphere. The Council then votes to select the "Best" of all these posts.The IHC story suggests that the U.N.'s failures of governance are not confined to such special projects as the Oil for Food program. If anything, Oil for Food looks more and more like a large outcropping of U.N. business as usual. And as with Oil for Food, which ran from December 1996 until the fall of Saddam in 2003, the timeline of IHC business with the U.N. starts in December 1996. That was the month before Kofi Annan took over as secretary-general, and it is on his watch that the IHC-U.N. tale has unfolded.
Headquartered on the sixth floor of a modest midtown Manhattan high-rise, with additional offices in Milan, IHC was, until this June, one of many companies approved by the U.N. as a registered vendor to its procurement division--which handles U.N. contracting for everything from office supplies to rations for peacekeeping troops. IHC signed some deals directly with the U.N., and on others served as a go-between for third-party contractors--despite the U.N.'s officially stated preference for avoiding middlemen.
Since the U.N. handles its contracts with secrecy, the full extent of IHC's involvement in U.N. business is hard to know. But from documents seen by this writer, the amounts around 1999 involved millions of dollars; a few years later they involved scores of millions; and in the past year or two--counting IHC business partnerships--the totals reached hundreds of millions.
IHC's CEO Ezio Testa, has denied any wrong-doing. But IHC's history includes hiring the son of a U.N. official who later (and unrelated to the hiring) pled guilty to corruption in federal court. In addition, a star U.N. diplomat served as chairman of the IHC board of directors while also holding a post as personal representative of the U.N. secretary-general. On top of that, IHC appears to have had access to valuable inside information on U.N. contract bids, which in at least one documented case it shared with a company involved in the bid.
Last year, information was bubbling around in unofficial quarters that something was amiss in the U.N. procurement department. Together with Fox News executive editor George Russell, I began looking into it. A name that came to our attention was Alexander Yakovlev, a Russian staffer in the procurement department. Imagine our surprise when Mr. Yakovlev was depicted in a Feb. 3 interim report from Paul Volcker's Oil for Food probe as a defender of integrity in the U.N. procurement department, where he'd handled Oil for Food inspection contracts.
Iran's hard-line president called for Israel to be "wiped off the map" and said a new wave of Palestinian attacks will destroy the Jewish state, state-run media reported Wednesday.
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad also denounced attempts to recognize Israel or normalize relations with it.
"There is no doubt that the new wave (of attacks) in Palestine will wipe off this stigma (Israel) from the face of the Islamic world," Ahmadinejad told students Wednesday during a Tehran conference called "The World without Zionism."
"Anybody who recognizes Israel will burn in the fire of the Islamic nation's fury, (while) any (Islamic leader) who recognizes the Zionist regime means he is acknowledging the surrender and defeat of the Islamic world," Ahmadinejad said.
Yes, we are all hypocrites and I talk about that in the book. But liberal hypocrisy and conservative hypocrisy are quite different on two accounts. First, you hear about conservative hypocrisy all the time. A pro-family congressman caught in an extramarital affair, a minister caught in the same. This stuff is exposed by the media all the time. The leaders of the liberal-Left get a complete pass on their hypocrisy. Second, and this is even more important, the consequences of liberal hypocrisy are different than for the conservative variety. When conservatives abandon their principles and become hypocrites, they end up hurting themselves and their families. Conservative principles are like guard rails on a winding road. They are irritating but fundamentally good for you. Liberal hypocrisy is the opposite. When the liberal-left abandon their principles and become hypocrites, they actually improve their lives. Their kids end up in better schools, they have more money, and their families are more content. They're ideas are truly that bad.
While the Bush administration hunkers down on indictment watch, Congress should take a look at political — and possibly illegal — activity by agenda-driven intelligence operatives.
Whatever fate befalls White House adviser Karl Rove, Vice Presidential Chief of Staff Lewis Libby and any other administration official caught up in the prosecution over the leaked name of a CIA officer, there's a back story to this case that should not be ignored.
It's about the CIA itself.
This is a story that most of the media will be trying hard not to cover. They share former Ambassador Joseph Wilson's stated desire to see Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald "frog-march" Rove out of the White House in handcuffs.
So Congress should leave the media no choice. Hold hearings. Put the CIA on the spot and blow the lid off any politically motivated funny business. Bring some transparency to what has become a very murky issue.
We believe that someone needs to answer the questions raised recently by Joseph F. DiGenova, a former federal prosecutor and independent counsel:
Was there a covert operation against the president?
If so, who was behind it?
These aren't the musings of the tinfoil-hat brigade. A sober-minded case can be made that at least some people in the CIA may have acted inappropriately to discredit the administration as a way of salvaging their own reputations after the intelligence debacles of 9-11 and Iraqi WMD.
Well, I think that whoever those people were, what they were involved in here was trying to discredit what they took to be the president's policy. I mean, there seems to be a thinking in some parts of the foreign policy establishment that an elected president, and the subordinates that he chooses as persuant to law, are not entitled to follow a policy that the career people at the CIA think is a bad policy. I had the sort of thought American government works the other way. That is to say civil servants, government employees, follow the policy of the elected officials. But this case, clearly there were people at the CIA that were trying to discredit Bush's policy of military action in Iraq. And clearly, Valerie Plame and Joseph Wilson were part of that. And in addition, we also know that Joseph Wilson told numerous lies about this situation. He characterized his report, which was not a written report to the CIA, as disclosing no evidence that there was attempts by Iraq to buy uranium in Niger. But the CIA people that took a look at what he reported, or heard what he reported, concluded that he actually found some evidence that Iraq had made an attempt to obtain uranium in Niger.[emphasis mine)
Here is a hypothetical family constellation: A black person who has grown up in the entitlement system will have been subject to the message, over and over again, that he or she is unable to compete on a level playing field with whites. They are empowered by the liberal entitlement workers (social workers talk about "empowerment" which is defined as a better ability to extract what they are entitled to from the system) to maintain their status as a dependent on the state. Even without noxious government employees, this is a set up to feel humiliated and condescended to. A dependent adult struggles with feelings of inadequacy (after all, the message is that they are inadequate!) and internalizes such feelings. Unfortunately, even those black Americans who are successful are tainted by such stigmata. They will wonder if they are truly capable and qualified or have attained their position by virtue of assistance from the more powerful, more capable white man.
Matters become even more complicated when a generation grows up raised by parents who feel devalued and imagine themselves to be devalued, lesser people. When you add in that the father has been completely devalued and marginalized by the radical feminist "scholars" who hold sway in our liberal arts universities and the PC-thought that is an outgrowth of radical feminism, the young black male as an endangered species is inevitable.
So it seems clear to me that an indictment under either of these statutes would be a gross injustice. It is a general principle of law that when the government wants to criminalize acts other than traditional common law crimes like murder or theft, it must set out with great specificity the conduct that is forbidden. To visit the rigors of criminal indictment, trial and punishment on someone who has done nothing that is specifically forbidden is unjust -- the very definition of injustice.
That leaves the question of whether Rove, Libby or someone else will be indicted for perjury, obstruction of justice or making false statements in the course of the investigation. But why should there be indictments if there was no crime?
True, Rove and Libby did seek to discredit Joseph Wilson -- as they should well have done. As the Senate Intelligence Committee concluded in a bipartisan report in July 2004, just about everything Wilson said publicly about his trip to Niger was untrue. He said that he had discredited reports that Iraq sought to buy uranium in Niger. But the CIA people to whom he reported concluded that, if anything, he substantiated such reports. He said that he pointed out that certain other intelligence reports were forged. But the forgeries did not appear until eight months after his trip. He said his wife had nothing to do with his trip to Niger. But it was she who recommended him for the trip. And on and on.
In the absence of a violation of the underlying espionage acts, any indictment here arising from the course of the investigation would be, in my view, unjust and an abuse of prosecutorial discretion.
Rooting for Rove's indictment in this case isn't just unseemly, it's unthinking and ultimately self-destructive. Anyone who cares about civil liberties, freedom of information, or even just fair play should have been skeptical about Fitzgerald's investigation from the start. Claiming a few conservative scalps might be satisfying, but they'll come at a cost to principles liberals hold dear: the press's right to find out, the government's ability to disclose, and the public's right to know.
A Pakistani newspaper Ausaf published from Multan has reported that Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden died four months ago in a village near Kandahar of severe illness.
According to the newspaper report, Bin Laden was campaigning at Bamiyan, fell very ill, returned to Kandahar where he died and was buried in the Shada graveyard in the shadow of a mountain.
The controversy continues to surround Osama bin Laden and while US and Pakistan officials have often been quoted by the media as saying that his mortal status was just a matter of detail, the hunt is still on and the issue remains a topic of great interest for the media and governments alike.
Funeral prayers have been said for Osama bin Laden over these years with one reported now by the Ausaf, and another in an Egyptian newspaper Al Wafd as far back as December 2001.
Osama bin Laden has a reward of $25 million on his head. Despite this he remains elusive, and could remain that way for a long time, alive or dead.
"Imagine you're a woman, and you are subject to assault, beatings, or murder. When the press publishes your photo [together with] the photo of the criminals and [descriptions] of their brutality, there are people who ask: 'Was the victim covered [by a veil] or not?' If she was covered up, [the question arises:] 'Who let her go out of the house at such an hour?' In the event that your husband is the one who broke your ribs, [people will say] that no doubt there was good reason for it.
"Imagine you're a woman whose husband breaks her nose, arm, or leg, and you go to the Qadi to lodge a complaint. When the Qadi asks you about your complaint, and you say, 'He beat me,' he responds reproachfully 'That's all?!' In other words, [for the Qadi], beating is a technical situation that exists among all couples and lovers, [as the saying goes]: 'Beating the beloved is like eating raisins.'
"Imagine you're a woman, and in order to manage your affairs you must ride in a 'limousine' with an Indian or Sri Lankan driver... or that you [must] wait for a younger brother to take you to work, or that you [must] bring a man who will learn to drive in your car, and will practice at your expense... because you yourself are not permitted to drive.
"Imagine you're a woman in the 21st century, and you see fatwas [issued] by some contemporary experts in Islamic law dealing with the rules regarding taking the women of the enemy prisoner and having sexual intercourse with them. Moreover, you find someone issuing a fatwa about the rules of taking the women of the enemy prisoner even in times of peace, and you don't know to which enemy women it refers.
"Imagine you're a woman who writes in a newspaper, and every time you write about your [women's] concerns, problems, poverty, unemployment, and legal status, they say about you: 'Never mind her, it's all women's talk.'"
My blog is worth $510,908.70.
How much is your blog worth?
Next morning, I got information from the Army that there had been 19 attacks on polling sites throughout Iraq, and in January there had been 108. There may be some garble in the numbers (there usually is). There had actually been somewhere between 300 and 350 total attacks on the January election day. And the army would later say that there were 89 total attacks during the voting last week. Who knows? I know that it was quiet from my perch, and that the guns had been silenced long enough that we could hear the Iraqi voice speak for a second time. The voice was louder, stronger, and prouder than it had been in January.
Time for the weekly insanity update, where the insane, the bizarre, the ridiculous, and the completely absurd are highlighted for all to see! This has been a week of rare idiocy (as always!). Calling all bloggers! Be sure to send in your entries to the Carnival, which will be posted every Sunday. Entries need to be in by 8 pm on Saturday to make their way into the list that week. Only one post entry per blogger, please. Thanks for all the submissions. SO MANY INSANITIES! SO LITTLE TIME!3. And speaking of that, the press should be outraged at this staged event.
4. Does the term "child abuse" mean anything to people like this? How about the term "ironic"? Or "religion of peace"?
5. Captain Ed has a great way to keep your sanity these days. But these poor people are truly suffering!
6. Democratic operatives are invisible to the MSM.
7. Piglet and Pooh reprieved!
8. Of course, the best debunking would be to ask her if she said it or not.
9. Oh, right. They always tell the truth.
10. Just what the world needs: more hallucinating, sleep-deprived people!
11. A quasi-totalitarian feminist state. That's something to look forward to as the feminist movement gets weirder and weirder.
For the record, since my table companion doesn't know or doesn't care, the top 1 percent -- the taxpayers with an adjusted gross income (AGI) over $295,495 -- paid, for 2003, 34.27 percent of federal income tax revenues. The top 10 percent (with an AGI over $94,891) paid 65.84 percent, the top half (AGI over $29,019) paid 96.54 percent. The bottom half? They paid 3.46 percent.
People should know this. Even if you live in Seattle.
This week's winners in the Watcher's Council are now posted at the Watcher of Weasels. Every week the Council nominates posts from the blogs of the Council members, and posts from around the blogsphere. The Council then votes to select the "Best" of all these posts.The fundamental feature of the United Nations is its policy of opening membership non-judgmentally to all nations--whether free or oppressive, peaceful or belligerent. This is upheld as the UN's central virtue and a vital means to peace. Admitting blatantly tyrannical regimes, proponents say, creates opportunities for "dialogue" and rehabilitation. As Kofi Annan explains, the very fact that such "non-democratic states" sign on "to the UN's agenda opens an avenue through which other states, as well as civil society around the world, can press them to align their behavior with their commitments."
But UN membership did not prevent the USSR (a founding member) from herding its citizens into gulags and forced-labor camps, murdering untold numbers of them, and invading other states; nor China from crushing under its military boot pro-freedom demonstrators and peaceful ideological dissenters; nor Iran and Saudi Arabia from infusing Islamist terrorist groups with abundant financial means and the ideological zeal to wage jihad against the West.
The UN's policy of neutrality accomplishes precisely the opposite of its putative effect; it actually protects and bolsters vicious regimes.
Participation in the UN confers on them an unearned moral legitimacy. That the leaders of such regimes are routinely invited to speak before the UN rewards them with an undeserved respectability. So it was with Fidel Castro: his self-justifying UN speech after seizing power in Cuba elicited rapturous applause. He was raised to the dignity of statesman -- a man who deals in reasoned argument -- despite being a totalitarian ruler who brutally silences dissidents. And the unwarranted recognition of arch-terrorist Yasser Arafat as a statesman arguably began when he first spoke at the United Nations in 1974. Though such men attain and hold power by force, though they preach murderous ideologies, though they devastate the lives of their subjects -- the United Nations unfastidiously endorses them and their regimes.
The United Nations thus gives them a means to entrench their power.
Great lede: “The big irony to savor at the center of the Valerie Plame case is that everything everyone thinks they know about Patrick Fitzgerald's leak investigation has been leaked.”
Also: “ Where would the president's critics be without anonymous and classified disclosures from CIA analysts, diplomats, and military officers unhappy with the president's policy? Without these intelligence leaks the public would never have learned that, say, Ahmad Chalabi allegedly fooled the entire American intelligence community into believing that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. Valerie Plame's husband, Joseph Wilson, was a leaker when he, acting anonymously, shared his story of a secret trip to Niger with the New Republic. A whole literature devoted to demonizing the neoconservatives is at risk.”
And: “The editor of the trade publication, Editor & Publisher, Greg Mitchell, called for the New York Times to fire Ms. Miller, complaining that he found it hard to believe Ms. Miller could not remember who told her the name "Valerie Flame," as she wrote in her notebook. Let's get this straight. The editor of a publication devoted to covering newspapers is angry that a reporter didn't disclose enough of her confidential sources to a grand jury in a criminal prosecution.”
One more: “Mr. Wilson also said that Mr. Cheney authorized his trip to Niger and therefore the vice president knew that it was false to claim Iraq had sought uranium from Africa. Based on the accounts of reporters Ms. Miller and Matthew Cooper, it appears that if there was a mention of Mr. Wilson's wife by Messrs. Rove or Libby, it was an effort not to burn an official at the Central Intelligence Agency but to correct Mr. Wilson's own misstatement about Mr. Cheney's knowledge of his secret mission.”
"When the Abu Ghraib prison scandal broke, there was not a single Arab who did not express the opinion that it was a despicable, mean [act] contrary to humanist values. They are right about this. But these people swiftly forgot their humanism and sealed their lips when the Jordanian terrorist Abu Mus'ab Al-Zarqawi declared war against the Shi'ites in Iraq, and began to dispatch his booby-trapped soldiers to blow themselves up among children, women, and the elderly. None of those [who denounced the Abu Ghraib scandal] uttered a word and none shed a tear for the hundreds and thousands of Iraqis being murdered and whose bodies are being mutilated.
"The first to denounce [the Abu Ghraib scandal] were the Americans themselves, who thought that the acts of some of their soldiers distorted the image of the U.S. and served as a mark of shame...
"But don't the Arabs feel an even greater sense of shame when some of them kill and massacre Iraqi citizens? Don't the rest [of the people] feel pangs of conscience when they try to come up with excuses and justifications for the murderers and criminals whom they call the 'resistance?' How can someone outraged at the torture of or disrespect for another person be silent and ignore [Al-Zarqawi's] declaration of the [program of] extermination of millions of people because of their sectarian affiliation?
"How is one to [describe] the Arab silence [in general] and the Sunni [silence] in particular in light of the murder of Shi'ite Iraqis and their intimidation in the most despicable and base of ways?... After all, the murderers declare their positions publicly, brag about them, and consider them Jihad for the sake of Allah. [Even] if what has happened does not stir up the regular Arab citizen – who has been brainwashed, and whose will has been totally eroded – how is one to explain [this same position when it is adopted by] politicians and members of the media?"
The Iraqis who have risen up against the occupation are not "insurgents" or "terrorists" or "The Enemy." They are the REVOLUTION, the Minutemen, and their numbers will grow -- and they will win....I oppose the U.N. or anyone else risking the lives of their citizens to extract us from our debacle...the majority of Americans supported this war once it began and, sadly, that majority must now sacrifice their children until enough blood has been let that maybe -- just maybe -- God and the Iraqi people will forgive us in the end.
This story is just slowly getting more and more interesting. There are powerful forces at work here trying to hold it back. From that alone we can estimate its importance.
