More reasonable doubt on Hadith

The Doctor whose reports spurred the Time Magazine report is affiliated with a pro-terrorist group and apparently has slandered American troops in the past.

"American President" coming only on Fox!

If Karl Rove is as shrewd as people say, this should suggest something.

Shale Oil in 2 or 3 years?

That's what an energy company in Eastern Utah claims at a price of $40.00 per barrel.

It's estimated that Utah has more oil in shale deposits than there is oil in Saudi Arabia, according to John Baardson, chief executive officer of Oil Tech partner BAARD Energy.

And throughout Utah, Colorado and Wyoming, an estimated 1 trillion barrels of oil are locked in shale, compared with about 700 billion barrels of untapped oil in the entire Middle East, he said.

There needs to be some means to prevent this from being undercut by cheap oil overseas. We need to do everything we can to deprive the Arabs, Nigeria and Venezuela of oil revenues.

New New Media

Austin Bay proposes The Astonishing News Network.

Come together

Owen West, a reserve Marine major who served in Iraq, and the founder of Vets for Freedom, provides a clear-eyed explanation of the war:

Somehow Operation Iraqi Freedom, not a large war by America's historical standards, has blossomed into a crisis of expectations that threatens our ability to react to future threats with a fist instead of five fingers. Instead of rallying we are squabbling, even as the slow fuse burns.

One party is overly sanguine, unwilling to acknowledge its errors. The other is overly maudlin, unable to forgive the same. The Bush administration seeks to insulate the public from the reality of war, placing its burden on the few. The press has tried to fill that gap by exposing the raw brutality of the insurgency; but it has often done so without context, leaving a clear implication that we can never win.. . .

We are clashing with an enemy who has been at war with us in one form or another for two decades. Our military response may take decades more. We have crossed several rivers and the nation is hoping that ahead lie streams. But if they are oceans, we should heed Lincoln's call: "With malice toward none, with charity for all ... let us strive on to finish the work we are in."

This is the vision we hoped for after 9/11, but it ended once the anti-war left and the Deaniacs became ascendant once more.

I saw that Bobby Kennedy, Jr. is publishing a piece claiming that the Republicans committed massive voter fraud and stole Ohio in 2004, and it made me sad. Even if it were true, which I don't believe, what good does it do to obsess over it? Nixon probably should have won in 1960, and I think his bitterness over it lead to Watergate. He didn't need any of the enemies list or the plumbers to beat McGovern, but his obsession with playing hardball got the better of him.

The Democrats are now in the middle of the same state of bitter obsession. But we don't re-do elections, two years after they have been done. Is it really possible that they could hate Bush more than they already do? If this is supposed to charge up the base, it's too soon. If not, it's nothing more than an historical exercise, and historians will never agree on it.

Old idea is new again

My question is how high they have to fly to be out of RPG range. I presume each unit would come with a 50 gallon drum of Fix-A-Flat.

Suing Michael Moore

I sense another movie in the works. I hope Moore loses, and I hope it's enough to put him out of business.

NOLA Requiem

Congratulations! I knew this last December. I'm in favor of helping people get out of a burning building, but when they move back in, . . .

At the very least, there should be efforts underway to build up the city to above sea level and keep it there. But if it were responsible, NOLA would probably lose its attraction, which seems to be based on tempting fate.

Haditha additional thoughts

We should be pretty careful about giving automatic credence to the version we've heard from Rep. Murtha and the MSM. I remember well how Saddam would place civilians in military targets to accuse us of targeting civilians. It wouldn't surprise me if something similar was going on here. We know that our media are pretty willing to be manipulated by terrorists.

I'm willing to suspend judgement until I have more facts, and I'd rather take the Marine Corps' word than Time magazine's.

Mormon Paper disses Mormon senator

Not exactly man biting dog. The Deseret News is owned by the LDS church, but the church doesn't involve itself in party politics, only issues.

Personally, I don't believe it's consistent with the gospel to support boxing or betting. Apparently, Elder Reid sees it differently.

What goes around . . .

Those people whose congresspersons complained so much about the Patriot Act may be losing a share of their DHS spending.

On "sitting out" elections

I keep hearing people calling radio shows talking about sitting out this election, even if it means handing Congress to the Democrats. I don't understand that kind of thinking. A lot of Conservative Republicans now seem to think that the way to send a message to their representatives and senators is to get them defeated. The "logic" escapes me. Why bother sending them a message which makes them irrelevant? After they're out of office, who cares what "message" they got.

I've had Senator Hatch as my representative for about 30 years and I keep hoping someone better will come along. Hatch is more of a comic figure than what I think of as an archetypal senator, but he votes Republican. He may be a water-carrier, but he's reliable. Just don't nominate him for SCOTUS. Please!

Senator Bennett is also reliable. I like him better than Hatch. He just seems more intelligent and his background as a lobbyist, along with the fact that his father was a senator for many years, assures me that he understands how power works in a legislature and how things get done.

If one of them were John McCain, I'd vote against him in any primary, probably, and then I'd hold my nose and vote for him. He is so stubborn and has such a liberal sense of government having compassion that he's all over the lot. His support for the current Senate immigration bill illustrates what I saying. He has these ideals of what things should be like that have little or no correspondence to the real world. Did he really think that Congress would have passed his campaign finance bill if they didn't believe they had a way to get around it? He has a military officer's concern for careful spending. In one sense, the qualities that helped him survive his years as a POW are also the ones that make him ill suited to be a politician. His bullheadedness and his faith in government's effectiveness in upholding his ideals are both admirable and naive.

The only thing worse would be if he were a Democrat who would switch the balance to that party. Even a spendthrift Republican who votes for tax cuts, is better than a Democrat who wants them repealed. Politics is an incremental process. Look how long it took to get conservative judges appointed. And we are still only at the status quo.

This "I'm taking my marbles and going home" attitude is childish and one reason why it's so hard for ideologues to maintain power.

A New Hitler?

Ahmadinejad is building his own high visibility into political power.

Political analysts and people close to the government here say Mr. Ahmadinejad and his allies are trying to buttress a system of conservative clerical rule that has lost credibility with the public. Their strategy hinges on trying to win concessions from the West on Iran's nuclear program and opening direct, high-level talks with the United States, while easing social restrictions, cracking down on political dissent and building a new political class from outside the clergy.

Mr. Ahmadinejad is pressing far beyond the boundaries set by other presidents. For the first time since the revolution, a president has overshadowed the nation's chief cleric, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, on both domestic and international affairs.

He may be headed toward cult status like that built by bin Laden, but he'll be much more difficult to put on the run. Iran is not Afghanistan.

The article seems to miss something important, however:

The changing nature of Iran's domestic political landscape has potentially far-reaching implications for the United States. While Iran has adopted a confrontational approach toward the West, it has also signaled — however clumsily — a desire to mend relations. Though the content of Mr. Ahmadinejad's letter to President Bush was widely mocked here and in Washington for its religious focus and preachy tone, it played well to Iran's most conservative religious leaders. Analysts here said it represented both Mr. Ahmadinejad's independence and his position as a messenger for the system, and that the very act of reaching out was significant.

The point of Mr. A's letter was not to be chummy, but to serve notice on the West as Mohammed once did, that they are invited to accept Islam and if they don't what comes next will be considered a just jihad under Islamic Law. I'm not impressed by the view that this "reaching out" was a positive signal.

Senate/Press fail their main responsibilities

Robert Samuelson, not having a degree in journalism makes the faux pas of criticizing the failings of the MSM. Nice going. (HT: Power Line)

His best line is the following:

One job of journalism is to inform the public what our political leaders are doing.

That's what most of us here among the great unwashed believed. More and more, though, we're seeing broad strokes masquerading as analysis, mixed with political spin that only those inside the Beltway really are interested in.

A second point is that I've heard the points mentioned by Mr. Samuelson several times before by callers to talk radio shows. It does seem that the Senate was more interested in kicking this can down the road than in making sound policy. They're afraid of Hispanic/Latino voters. With the Democrats that's understandable, since they've put so much effort into making it easier to commit vote fraud and enlist this group as a bloc, as it has African-Americans.

Haditha

CNN correspondent Arwa Damon finds that she knows some of the Marines accused of the Haditha Massacre. It makes it much harder to assume they're guilty, and to wait for the full investigation.

Iran Matters

Riots in Iran! How can we help these people? As I viewed the photos, I remembered Admadinejad's letter to President Bush where he recited a list of pious cliches, and in a covert manner, threatened us with Jihad.