A Change At the WaPo?

Powerline, today:

Rumor has it that the Washington Post will name Susan Glasser, currently the head of the paper’s Outlook section, to be in charge of all news sections at the Post.

I’ve heard similar rumors.. from of all places, the Post, themselves. And it makes sense, from a busienss perspective.  As PL points up:

…under Glasser the Outlook section seemed to adopt “a feminist agenda with a lot of navel gazing,” becoming something of a ‘Joy Luck Club’ for liberals finding life difficult. One Power Line reader who knows Glasser described her as “a flaming feminist. . .who would remind the average conservative blogger of Mary Mapes.”

A brilliant bit of targeting, really.  Who else reads the Washington Post, anymore, except for liberals, who think Mary Mapes is an unbiased news person, unfairly targeted by those opposed to John Kerry?

I can’t say that I have been this pleased this quickly about how a site falls together as I have been with this project.  Those who have been readers for quite awhile will understand the depth of what I’m saying here.

I must say, that getting WORDPRESS going, and looking good, was far easier than I had envisioned it. Indeed, the only fly in the ointment thus far has been my inability to bring all of the ratings over from the old Blogspot blog.  At this stage, the count is somewhere around 4500 and change posts, which is about half of the total that we had online at the old site.

That sort of problem aside, this thing has fallen together so quickly, that I keep looking around, thinking I had forgotten something.  Now, it should be said in that context, that my years of making the most out of Blogger, served me very well, in terms of understanding all the technical concepts involved.  Well, most of them, anyway.  There were few aspects of handling the database that I had only seen in passing in the blogging context.  (Yes, of course, I’ve dealt with databases in my professional life for twenty years, but using them in this fashion was an entirely new thing for me. )

I should say a word, about the comments.  First of all anybody can register.  However, at the moment, I have it set so that I need to approve all comments before they go up.  I’m sure that as I get used to using that part of the software, I will ease that off a notch or three.  But please do register so that you can comment.

So says Mindanao.com:

It happened today, the Philippine Armed Forces (AFP) got a huge catch in the War on Terror! Remember the group of hostages that was taken by the Abu Sayyaf in June of 2001? That’s the same group that included Martin and Gracia Burnham, the American Missionary couple that was held by the Abu Sayyaf. In the end, Martin was killed by his captors, while Gracia was injured, but able to return alive to the United States. At that time, another of the American Hostages, Guillermo Sobrero was beheaded by his Abu Sayyaf captors.

Well, today, the AFP nabbed the very suspect that beheaded Guillermo Sobrero, a huge win in the War on Terror. If the news gets coverage in the United States, I am certain that a lot of Americans will cheer this and consider it a huge win for the Government of the Philippines.

Yes, ‘ll do that. But I have to tell you, the idea of god to the point where I consider it a small bust if we didn’t grab a bunch of his fellow Islamo-fascists with him.

LONDON —(Fox)- Scotland Yard detectives said Saturday that a London sushi restaurant frequented by a former Russian spy turned Kremlin critic who died with a rare radioactive substance in his system had to be decontaminated after polonium-210 was found.

Alexander Litvinenko died late Thursday at a London hospital after days in intensive care as doctors puzzled over what was destroying his immune system and causing his organs to fail.  Police said they were not yet treating the case as a murder, rather as an “unexplained death.”

Well, you always knew that sushi was gonna kill you, eventually.

Meanwhile, I’m seeing unconfirmed reports that Litvinenko converted to Islam before his death. there’s something a little on about all this.  There is something going on here that runs a little deeper than Litvinenko and Putin. what, exactly, I don’t know.  But I get the feeling that we’re not going in the end of this one for several years.

Michelle Malkin today

Blabbermouths at the New York Times, who have been accused by federal prosecutors of tipping off Islamic charities fronting for terror, want Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg to protect them:

The New York Times asked the Supreme Court yesterday to bar a federal prosecutor from reviewing the phone records of two of its reporters. The records, lawyers for The Times said, would allow the government to learn the identities of many of the reporters’ confidential sources.The case arose from a Chicago grand jury’s investigation into who told the two reporters, Judith Miller and Philip Shenon, about actions the government was planning to take in 2001 against two Islamic charities. The United States attorney in Chicago, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, sought the reporters’ records directly from their phone companies, and The Times filed suit to stop him.

In August, a divided three-judge panel of the federal appeals court in Manhattan ruled in favor of Mr. Fitzgerald, saying the reporters were not entitled to shield their sources. The needs of law enforcement, the majority said, outweighed any protections the reporters might have in the First Amendment or other areas of law.

Ms. Miller left the paper last year after spending 85 days in jail in connection with a separate leak investigation, also supervised by Mr. Fitzgerald.

The paper’s filing yesterday was a limited one, seeking an order from Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg staying the appeals court decision until the Supreme Court has an opportunity to decide whether to hear the case. The deadline for seeking review of the appeals court’s decision is in January, but The Times said it would move faster.

In a letter filed in response to yesterday’s application, the Justice Department said it “desires to review the records in question as expeditiously as possible” but agreed not to do so until Wednesday. Yesterday afternoon, the court ordered the government to submit a formal response to the stay application by today at 4 p.m.

I wrote about the case in June here and talked about it on Fox News in July after another Fox News media commentator, Marvin Kalb, professed ignorance of the story (video here). The key points:

As the New York Post reported last September, the Justice Department charged that “a veteran New York Times foreign correspondent warned an alleged terror-funding Islamic charity that the FBI was about to raid its office — potentially endangering the lives of federal agents.” Times reporter Philip Shenon was accused of blowing the cover on a Dec. 14, 2001, raid of the Global Relief Foundation.”It has been conclusively established that Global Relief Foundation learned of the search from reporter Philip Shenon of The New York Times,” U.S. attorney Patrick Fitzgerald wrote in an Aug. 7, 2002, letter to the Times’ legal department.

Shenon’s phone tip to the Muslim charity (which occurred one day before the FBI searched the foundation’s offices), Fitzgerald said, “seriously compromised the integrity of the investigation and potentially endangered the safety of federal law-enforcement personnel.” The Global Relief Foundation (GRF) wasn’t some beneficent neighborhood charity sending shoes and Muslim Barbie dolls to poor kids overseas. It was designated a terror-financing organization in October 2002 by the Treasury Department, which reported that GRF “has connections to, has provided support for, and has provided assistance to Usama Bin Ladin, the al Qaida Network, and other known terrorist groups.”

The Muslim charity had “received funding from individuals associated with al Qaida. GRF officials have had extensive contacts with a close associate of Usama Bin Ladin, who has been convicted in a U.S. court for his role in the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.” Moreover, the Treasury Department said, “GRF members have dealt with officials of the Taliban, while the Taliban was subject to international sanctions.”

Shenon’s then-colleague, Judith Miller, had placed a similar call to another Muslim terrorist-front financier, the Holy Land Foundation, a few weeks before Shenon’s call to the GRF. She was supposedly asking for “comment” on an impending freeze of their assets. According to Fitzgerald in court papers, Miller allegedly also warned them that “government action was imminent.” The FBI raided the Holy Land Foundation’s offices the day after Miller’s article was published in the Times.

The NYTimes’ refusal to cooperate with the feds to find illegal leakers in these counterterrorism cases deserves to be on the front page. Spread the word.

So I have done, Michelle.

I suppose that nobody should find it surprising that the times should run, howling, to Ginsberg, likely the most liberal judge on the court in years.

Tricia Bishop reports “Christmas is back” Kudos to Walmat.  It is always nice to see political correctness knocked back a bit.

I must say I”m a little disappointed that McQ hasn’t been running his excellent “Project Hero” bits for the last few weeks, over at Q&O. No shortage of this kind of news, though… For example, Chuck Simmins hasn’t stopped, noting this week in the Marine Corps News:

MARINE CORPS BASE CAMP PENDLETON, Calif. (May 3, 2004) — Marine Sgt. Marcos A. Martinez received the Navy Cross from the Secretary of the Navy, Honorable Gordon R. England, during a ceremony Monday at 5th Marine Regiment parade deck here.

“These brave Marines did good things without notice,” said England, “and without the acclaim of crowds. But they got the acclaim of their fellow Marines.”

Kevin G. Hall McClatchy Newspapers- WASHINGTON –Far from being a nearly exhausted resource, the world’s oil reserves are three times bigger than what some popular estimates state, and peak global oil production is still about a quarter-century away, according to a new study by Pulitzer Prize-winning oil historian Daniel Yergin.

The remaining oil resource base is about 3.74 trillion barrels, according to a report released Tuesday by Cambridge Energy Research Associates, which Yergin runs. That’s more than three times the 1.2 trillion barrels that “peak-oil” theorists suggest.

…

“This is really the fifth time we’ve `run out of oil,'” Yergin said in a teleconference with journalists on Tuesday. He recalled past predictions dating back to 1880 of an end to oil or gasoline production.

Yergin’s views carry weight because he won the Pulitzer for his 1991 book “The Prize,” an exhaustive history of oil economics.

And there it is in a nutshell, gang.  The real bottom line here is that those advocating this “Peak Oil” nonsense, people like Al Gore and his roving band of troglodytes, are full of thick gooey brown stuff… and I don’t mean oil.

David Ignatius at the Wapo looks at the recent assassination of Lebanese cabinet minister Pierre Gemayel, and says:

A disease is eating away at the Middle East. It afflicts the Syrians, the Iraqis, the Lebanese, even the Israelis. It is the idea that the only political determinant in the Arab world is raw force — the power of physical intimidation. It is politics as assassination.

..

Those who imagined they could stop the assassins’ little guns with their big guns — the United States and Israel come to mind — have been undone by the howling gale of violence. In trying to fight the killers, they began to make their own arguments for assassination and torture. That should have been a sign that something had gone wrong.

Actually, no, David… we weren’t undone by the violence. That violence would have been the first sign that we’d made the right choice… to take physical action, as opposed to trying diplomacy… tired, toothless, and in the end of early worthless, except to those with the sickness as you mention.

The fact is with such a situation force is the only response possible. As you say yourself, it’s the only thing they understand. It became the coin of the realm long before you dispensed your wisdom on the subject.

The problem is, that force has to be applied over a long period of time.  Longer, apparently, then you and yours are willing to even consider. We are only in able to stop the killers, because we have announced their intention to withdraw.  And we were not about saving the Arab world from itself as you claim. Rather, we were about saving the remainder of the world from Arab extremism. You may recall that there were a few other places involved in our getting into this fight; Say, southern Manhattan for example.

And if you want further indication that these people simply cannot be negotiated with, that force, the answer you rejected, was the only viable one, I suggest you look no further than the London Times article cited by Captain Ed this morning.

In recent weeks the idea that the United States and the UK should “engage” Syria, but also Iran, to stabilise Iraq has been all the rage. On Tuesday, in an east Beirut suburb, Lebanon’s industry minister, Pierre Gemayel, showed what the cost of engagement might be.

And now, by means of a vote on the most react first Tuesday, the only viable solution to the problem has been rejected, and our enemy emboldened. Gemayel respectfully suggests that this may have not been the best path.

Earlier today, I wrote, as regards a scholarship for white collegians:

We need not look any further than the reaction to this scholarship fund, to understand that the equality was never the primary goal of such scholarships centered around minorities.

it is still in that same frame of mind that I stumble across a write-up on the wires of the Associated Press this afternoon.  The story relates the plight of one Kenny Kramer.. yes, the role model for the Seinfeld character who shared his name. Apparently, life has gotten rather interesting for Mr. Kramer following the supposedly racist outburst of one Michael Richards.

“I know the guy,” Kramer said of Richards. “He’s not this outgoing ball of fun that people would expect Kramer to be. They think he’s be exciting, lovable, laughable. But he’s quiet, introspective, even paranoid. He’s a very wound-up guy. But I don’t think he’s a racist.”

OK, be that as it may; we still end up with the leftist press hammering on Richards as regards his supposed racism.  Same deal Mel Gibson got.

So explain to me why this is funny.  Or, this: (caution, the language gets rough below the fold) Read the rest of this entry »

BAGHDAD (Reuters) – Gunmen bent on revenge burned mosques and homes in a Sunni enclave of Baghdad on Friday as Iraq’s leaders pleaded for calm, a day after the worst bomb attack since the U.S. invasion.

Some 30 people were killed, police said, as suspected Shi’ite militiamen rampaged for hours, untroubled by a curfew enforced in the capital by U.S. and Iraqi forces after bombs killed 202 people in the Shi’ite stronghold of Sadr City.

I have wondered how long it would be before the democrats and their policies would come home to roost.  I would suggest that what we are seeing is the democrats being effective…. even before they are elected.

Don’t think for a minute, dear reader, that their winning, here in the ‘states doesn’t signify to our enemy, that the United States has lost its stomach for this fight.  Don’t think for a minute that our enemy hasn’t been emboldened by this happening.  Don’t think for a minute that what we are seeing today is not a direct result of that Democrat victory.

Tony Hendra displays a scabble like list of bodily functons with a moron’s understanding of them.    What is remarkable about Hendra tirade is how little media response is has generated:

Allow me to enlarge somewhat O Lord upon this particular thanks. Despite six years of suppurating drivel from his catamites about leadership and inner strength and Christian fortitude and courage under fire: George W Bush is, was and always will be that sneering, leering little creep who came to school in a chauffeur-driven car, yelled racist epithets at the scholarship kids, tripped up the guy on crutches, stuck his paw up the dress of any girl he pleased, had his toadies beat up anyone smart or weak or different, insulted teachers to their faces – and got away with it all, because his Dad had just endowed the new sports stadium.

I will not link to the Puffinton Post.  I do present it as evidence of the liberal mind, such as it is.    The media response to Hendra simply is not there.     Recalling reprobates, like Hendra, is the Lords’ work, and I am but a mortal.

As you can see we’re starting to get into this.  The import process is still going on, slowly.  At the moment were up to around 2800 of the 7000 some odd posts that were on the old site.

And I still haven’t gotten around to figuring out how to bring the old sidebar, over to the new site.  Therefore, I haven’t the foggiest idea what my hit rates are like. (Shrug)

Personally, I’m not overly excited about the case of Barrett v. Rosenthal (PDF).

I know Glenn Reynolds is one example of folks speaking very highly of the ruling.  Eugene Volokh, as usual, gets into the legal aspects of it. Michelle Malkin doesn’t like it, explaining:

Perhaps because I have a foot in both the MSM and blog worlds and have been the target of defamation, I don’t see the ruling in quite the same positive light.

Why should online speech be held to a different standard than other speech?

If Barrett v. Rosenthal is applied to bloggers, as many assume it will be, if I re-publish a defamatory statement on this blog, I am immune from liability for libel.

But if I re-publish the exact same statement in my syndicated column published in print, I’m liable.

That absurd result is what the ruling seems to suggest and what many bloggers hope it suggests.

But aren’t bloggers the ones arguing that we should be treated like MSM journalists?

Not for my part.

Yes, I think that bloggers should in fact be treated like mainstream media journalists.  However…  (and here’s the rub that Michelle apparently doesn’t understand,) … my position…and I think, the position of a majority of bloggers, is that the press should not have any special rights whatsoever.

Certainly, we grant special rights on one hand, and special duties on the other, to public officials ; to firemen, policemen, judges, and so on.  We do this, because those extra rights are necessary for the responsibilities that those positions carry. That those positions and the rights that come with them have been open to abuse, and have been so abused on occasion, have long been the fodder of bloggers such as Billy Beck, for example.

But having established that, here’s the largest of issues in all of this: On what basis would we possibly grant the press, special rights? None whatsoever, that I can see.

In truth, there is a great deal of slop in this ruling, that will be sorted through over the next few years, and perhaps decades.
Part of the problem, part of the argument, necessarily, is definitional.  IE; How do we define what constitutes the press?  The remainder of the problem seems a matter of equal protection under the law. IE what can the acting in the public eye, do or not do?

But those are questions to which the answers lay on other questions… the definition of the words used.  Do we define bloggers to be members of the press?  If we do, what are the roles of the press, and what are the rights within those roles?  If we don’t, what are the roles and rights of each?

Frankly, I don’t share Michele’s paranoia as regards slander from blogs or much of anything else.  Certainly, I’ve been victim of it myself in my blogging life.  So, I think I can speak with a certain degree of authority on the subject.  I submit that bloggers to a large degree have taken up the position of the pamphlet pushers of the early 1800’s. A reading of some of those writings, most of them political, would certainly loosen the definition of “slander” to anyone who dared read them.

Look, I don’t know anyone who would be taking Maureen Dowd very seriously anymore.  That point aside, her writing of the other day, shows is clearly that the left really didn’t have anything in terms of a plan for Iraq.

Iraq now evokes that old Jimmy Durante song that goes, “Did you ever have the feeling that you wanted to go and still have the feeling that you wanted to stay?”

It’s hard to remember when America has been so stuck. We can’t win and we can’t leave.

The good news is that the election finished what Katrina started. It dismantled the president’s fake reality about Iraq, causing opinions to come gushing forth from all quarters about where to go from here.

The bad news is that no one, and I mean no one, really knows where to go from here.

So, in reality, the only thing the Democrats had going for them going into the election was they didn’t much like the plan that George W. Bush had laid out for Iraq… Which, in truth, was not all that different from the plan as regards Germany, and Japan following WWII.  It’s nice, however, to hear them at least admit that they really didn’t have a better option.  It’s nice to hear them admit, what I’ve been saying all along; there really isn’t a better option.

It would’ve been handy, however, to have this admission from the leftists’ cheering section, somewhere prior to the election. we might have actually saved some lives that way.