29 August 2006 @ 10:17PM >> As Katie Couric ascends to the anchor chair at CBS Evening News, her first big challenge will be to overcome her morning show persona as a fluff-peddling soft-news pusher. Theoretically, CBS would be interested in helping her with this. After all, the CBS News throne was once warmed by the buttocks of such gravitas-oozing alleged legends as Walter Cronkite and Dan Rather.

But apparently, staffers at CBS’s promotional magazine Watch! did not get the memo. Treating Couric like any other cover-gracing floozy-du-jour, her picture was photoshopped to de-frumpify her by several inches.

I’m guessing that Katie’s first story as CBS anchor will not be a discussion of women’s body image issues. (That was more of a Today show thing, anyway.)

But at least if you own stock in CBS parent Viacom, you should be happy with the company’s frugality. Flashier networks would have paid for the plastic surgery.

28 August 2006 @ 2:02PM >> Item 1: Despite the fact that a previous U.N. resolution ordered the disarmament of all non-governmental militias in Lebanon, Secretary General Kofi Annan says that the U.N. will not disarm Hizbollah. “Troops are not going in there to disarm — let’s be clear,” the U.N. leader said. Lebanon’s army is expected to disarm Hizbollah, the U.N. says, even though Lebanon’s own president says that his government will do no such thing. So, in other words, Israel settled for a cease-fire in which the U.N. gives Hizbollah more leeway than it had before the war. Talk about snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.

Item 2: A United Nations group called UNIFIL, the same group whose positions were used by Hizbollah to launch rockets into Israel, broadcast real-time Israeli troop and armaments movements during the recent war. Oddly, the U.N. group offered no such level of detail about Hizbollah’s operations, even though Hizbollah has a history of operating within several yards of UNIFIL. Anyone with an Internet connection could find this treasure-trove of military intelligence, but the information was really only valuable to people interested in fighting the Israeli army. Who wants to bet that UNIFIL is in Hizbollah’s bookmarks folder?

Long ago, the United Nations passed the point of being a joke. Now it’s a tragedy.

27 August 2006 @ 11:37AM >> Here’s what you’ll find at the Holocaust International Cartoon Contest exhibition currently being held in the Iranian capital:

There is [...] a drawing of a Jew with a very large nose, a nose so large, in fact, that it obscures his entire head. Across his chest is the word “Holocaust.” Another drawing shows a vampire, wearing a big Star of David, drinking the blood of Palestinians. A third shows Ariel Sharon dressed in a Nazi uniform, emblazoned not with swastikas, but with the Star of David.

The show’s curator is quoted as saying, “It is not that we are against a specific religion...”

Of course you’re not.

26 August 2006 @ 1:20PM >> This letter was apparently sent to Maryland Senator Paul Sarbanes by one of his constituents:

The Honorable Paul S. Sarbanes
309 Hart Senate Office Building
Washington DC, 20510

Dear Senator Sarbanes,

As a native Marylander and excellent customer of the Internal Revenue Service, I am writing to ask for your assistance. I have contacted the Immigration and Naturalization Service in an effort to determine the process for becoming an illegal alien and they referred me to you. My reasons for wishing to change my status from U.S. Citizen to illegal alien stem from the bill which was recently passed by the Senate and for which you voted. If my understanding of this bill’s provisions is accurate, as an illegal alien who has been in the United States for five years, what I need to do to become a citizen is to pay a $2,000 fine and income taxes for three of the last five years.

I know a good deal when I see one and I am anxious to get the process started before everyone figures it out. Simply put, those of us who have been here legally have had to pay taxes every year so I’m excited about the prospect of avoiding two years of taxes in return for paying a $2,000 fine. Is there any way that I can apply to be illegal retroactively? This would yield an excellent result for me and my family because we paid heavy taxes in 2004 and 2005.

Another benefit in gaining illegal status would be that my daughter would receive preferential treatment relative to her law school applications. If you would provide me with an outline of the process to become illegal (retroactively if possible) and copies of the necessary forms, I would be most appreciative.

Thank you for your assistance.

Your Loyal Constituent,
Pete McGlaughlin

(Hat tip: Mona Charen.)

25 August 2006 @ 1:46AM >> If there’s any hope for Iran, it’s not the old mulllahs.

25 August 2006 @ 1:35AM >> A woman with an unfortunate surname, Kola Boof, says that—for a while—she was Osama bin Laden’s “sex slave.” And if her story in Page Six is any indication, our man of Allah may in fact be a closeted fan of cheesy reality TV:

“He told me Whitney Houston was the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen.”

[...]

Boof says bin Laden couldn’t stop talking about his favorite singer and had lofty plans for her. “He said he wanted to give [her] a mansion that he owned in a suburb of Khartoum. He explained to me that to possess Whitney, he would be willing to break his color rule and make her one of his wives.”

“[He would say] how beautiful she is,” Boof claims, “what a nice smile she has, how truly Islamic she is but is just brainwashed by American culture and by her husband - Bobby Brown, whom Osama talked about having killed, as if it were normal to have womens’ husbands killed.

“In his briefcase, I would come across photographs of the Star [magazine], as well as copies of Playboy. It would soon come to the point where I was sick of hearing Whitney Houston’s name,” Boof writes.

Let’s see, here we learn that our lovelorn terrorist is obsessed with a trashy pop diva, he reads Star magazine, and he “reads” Playboy.

Maybe we are winning the culture war against radical Islam.

24 August 2006 @ 1:15PM >> Earlier this week, I shut down the discussion forum on Brain Terminal and replaced it with a new sister site called Free Speech Free-for-all.

In addition to providing a discussion forum much like the one that existed here, the new Free Speech Free-for-all site allows users to create their own blogs, post links to news stories, and conduct opinion polls.

Part of the reason behind spinning off a separate site is that I’m hoping Free Speech Free-for-all will develop into a community that does not lean heavily in one ideological direction or another.

Most online forums coalesce around a particular point of view. As a result, participants can very easily wall themselves off from information that challenges their assumptions. Groupthink develops over time, and the communities become echo chambers.

I think the value of online media is that everyone has ready access to information they might not otherwise see. The downside is that on the Internet, everyone can live within their own ideological cocoon.

In the past, non-partisan communities that discuss news and politics have had a very difficult time sustaining themselves online, because they usually end up devolving into endless flamewars. The people who contributed value to the community end up leaving, thinking that the conversation has become pointless.

Through smarter software, I hope to prevent that from happening.

It’s an experiment, and I’ll be tweaking the behavior of the site over time to try to strike the proper balance.

If you think this kind of experiment has merit, I hope you’ll join the free-for-all.

23 August 2006 @ 1:07AM >> The mullahs in Iran have come up with a great way to point out Western hypocrisy. Last week, USA Today carried this AP dispatch from Tehran, Iran:

An exhibition of cartoons about the Holocaust opened this week, reflecting Iran’s response to last year’s Muslim outrage over a caricature of the Prophet Mohammed in a Danish newspaper.

The display, showing 204 entries from Iran and abroad, was strongly influenced by the views of Iran’s hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who drew widespread condemnation last year for calling the Holocaust a “myth” and saying Israel should be destroyed.

One cartoon by Indonesian Tony Thomdean shows the Statue of Liberty holding a book on the Holocaust in its left hand and giving a Nazi-style salute with the other.

So far, it sounds like the kind of thing you might find at a left-wing protest here in the United States. And I can’t recall the expression of such sentiments ever resulting in a murderous backlash of rioting.

[The exhibit] came following worldwide protests by Muslims against the cartoons published by the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten. Many Muslims considered the cartoons a violation of traditions prohibiting images of their prophet.

[Iranian newspaper] Hamshahri said it wanted to test the West’s tolerance for drawings about the Nazi killing of 6 million Jews in World War II.

I’m sure we’ll handle it just fine. In fact, the folks behind these cartoons might just end up getting hired as professors.

And in other news related to Iran’s interesting definition of tolerance:

Human rights groups and concerned individuals worldwide are demanding an end to stoning executions in Iran - and right now are pressuring the head of the Islamic nation’s judiciary to lift the death sentence against a 34-year-old mother of two young children.

Malak Ghorbany was sentenced to death June 28 by a court in the Iranian city of Urmia after being found guilty of committing “adultery.”

Under Iran’s strict Sharia law, women sentenced to execution by stoning have their hands bound behind their back. They are wrapped from head to toe in sheets before being seated in a pit. The ditch is filled up to their breasts with dirt, and the soil is packed tightly before people assemble to execute the woman by pitching rocks at her head and upper body.

Article 104 of the Iranian Penal Code states that the stones used for execution should “not be large enough to kill the person by one or two strikes, nor should they be so small that they could not be defined as stones.”

Ironically, the court sentenced the woman’s brother Abu Bakr Ghorbany and husband Mohammad Daneshfar to only six years in jail for killing her lover. According to Sharia law, murder carries a lesser penalty than “crimes against chastity.”

Stonings decreased after international pressure on former reformist President Mohammad Khatami in the late ’90s. And Ayatollah Shahroudi, the current head of Iran’s judiciary, issued a ruling to judges ordering a moratorium on execution by stoning in December 2002. But the brutal killings have continued and the practice was never abolished from the penal code of the Islamic Republic. In May, two other women, Abbas Hajizadeh and Mahboubeh Mohammadi, were executed for committing adultery, with more than 100 members of the Revolutionary Guards and Bassij Forces participating in the stoning.

Iranian tolerance. Catch the feeling!

22 August 2006 @ 12:06AM >> Five years ago today, I launched this website with an essay on the Microsoft anti-trust case. Back then, I was a software developer, and I planned on using this site as a platform for discussing technology. (The word “terminal” in the name of the site originally referred the old “green screen” computer terminals, and is not an effort on my part to imply that I’m terminally brain dead, as a number of critics have kindly suggested.)

Less than three weeks after my first post, an event happened that changed the course of many lives. The attacks of September 11th ripped families apart and blasted a still-unfilled hole in lower Manhattan. The attacks also made it impossible to ignore radical Islam, a phenomenon that has been growing and threatening Western society since the 1970s.

Watching the towers burn from the rooftop of my office building re-connected me with my long-held passion for politics and world affairs, and the experience gave me a new purpose for this site.

About a year and a half later, I posted my first of a dozen short videos, and thanks to my run-in with Michael Moore, I stumbled into a career as a documentary filmmaker.

And now, this fall, my first feature-length documentary Indoctrinate U will be released.

What a long, strange trip it’s been.

Thanks to everyone who’s shared it with me, and to all of you who’ve written in with words of encouragement over the years.

21 August 2006 @ 3:43PM >> The Washington Post profiles left-wing documentarian Robert Greenwald and his innovative approach to film financing and distribution:

Greenwald’s documentaries generate more heat than coin. Their take at the box office is tiny (mostly they’re seen on DVD). “We weren’t raising anything,” says Greenwald, sitting on a recent afternoon in his office, located in what appears to be a converted motel behind the Sony Pictures lot, as his team rushed to complete the project for its debut next month.

The usual bankers of political documentaries — left-leaning organizations and high-roller liberal donors — weren’t rushing to write Greenwald any checks. Greenwald doesn’t know why. “Maybe I’m a lousy fundraiser,” he says.

Then Gilliam had his idea. Robert, why not go on the Internet and just ask for the money? “I thought he was crazy,” Greenwald says. “I thought this would never work.”

On April 25, Gilliam — weak at home in Newport Beach, his lungs scarred and ruined because of earlier cancer treatments, but still able to type — sent out a mass e-mail to thousands of people who had purchased DVDs or expressed interest in Greenwald’s movies or causes through the company’s various Web sites.

The e-mail alerted potential supporters that Greenwald was committed to making “Iraq for Sale: The War Profiteers,” and though they had not shot a single frame, Gilliam promised “it will have an enormous impact when it comes out shortly before the elections this November.”

The pitch? Gilliam wrote: “To start shooting, we need money. Overall, the film will cost $750,000. We can expect about $450,000 to be offset by DVD sales, selling foreign rights, and an advance from our retail store distributor, but we still need $300,000. A generous donor just stepped up and will contribute $100,000 if we can match it with $200,000 from someone else. That someone else is you! 4000 people giving $50 each. We’ll put everyone’s name in the credits.”

They got $267,892 in 10 days.

[...]

Small-scale independent filmmakers, the kind who bring their documentaries to the Sundance Film Festival, put together funding however they can — with art grants, money from educational or journalism foundations or from relatives and friends — and in many cases by racking up hefty balances on their credit cards.

Gilliam and Greenwald say they know of no one who has ever raised hundreds of thousands of dollars on the Internet to make a movie. (Though this year at Cannes, a do-it-yourself director named Melissa Balin attempted to auction her finished movie — “FreezerBurn” — on eBay. It sold in one market: Lithuania.)

“For all practical purposes, this is the first time I’ve heard of raising money for a film this way. I’ve got to hand it to them. I’m very impressed. It’s clever,” says Lawrence Turman, a veteran Hollywood producer of over 40 films (from “The Graduate” to “American History X”) and author of the how-to book “So You Want to Be a Producer.”

Turman says the Internet funding seems well suited for “political and in your face films” like Greenwald’s documentaries. “You’re not going to raise $40 million, but you might raise $1 million,” he says.

“I think this is the future,” Gilliam says. Not for standard Hollywood fare, he admits. But for niche product, for indie stuff. “It is my dream to pull this off,” Gilliam says. “To figure out how to fund movies out of the control of corporations. Our goal is to fund and distribute any movie we want to make completely outside of the system.”

21 August 2006 @ 8:54AM >> Associated Press reports:

Italian police were searching yesterday for a man suspected of involvement in the killing of a Pakistani woman after her father and uncle were charged with slitting her throat because she dated an Italian man and refused to conform to an Islamic lifestyle.

Investigators believe the third suspect helped the father and uncle kill Hina Saleem, 21. The woman’s body was found buried in the family’s garden in Sarezzo on Saturday. Her father and uncle were taken into custody on Monday.

Investigators said they were looking into the theory that the grave was dug before the woman was killed. It is thought a long kitchen knife was used to slit her throat.

18 August 2006 @ 8:45AM >> The Iranian mullahs have outlawed satellite dishes, and they’re now in the process of destroying the nearly 4 million residential satellite dishes in the country.

17 August 2006 @ 7:30AM >> Today’s issue of Los Angeles Times carries a manifesto in the form of a full-page ad signed by 85 Hollywood bigwigs.

I know what you’re thinking: maybe they’re complaining about low-thread-count linens for the prisoners Guantanamo Bay or the hurtful stereotyping of people named Osama.

Well, sit down and prepare yourself for a shock. This group of not-quite-100 honchos has issued a political statement the likes of which I’ve never seen from Hollywood: they’ve actually managed to point their fingers at a culprit that isn’t America or its evil, chimp-like leader.

Believe it or not, the people behind this ad argue that we need to “stop terrorism at all costs”, and they place the blame squarely on “terrorist organisations such as Hezbollah and Hamas.”

The folks lending their signature to this startling declaration include Nicole Kidman and:

Michael Douglas, Dennis Hopper, Sylvester Stallone, Bruce Willis, Danny De Vito, Don Johnson, James Woods, Kelly Preston, Patricia Heaton and William Hurt.

Directors Ridley Scott, Tony Scott, Michael Mann, Dick Donner and Sam Raimi also signed their names.

Other Hollywood powerplayers supporting the ad included Sumner Redstone, the chairman and majority owner of Paramount Pictures, and billionaire mogul, Haim Saban.

Hats off to all of them for recognizing terrorism for what it is, and that it must be stopped “at all costs” or “chaos will rule and innocent people will continue to die.”

Acknowledging that there are millions of people who want to kill you just because you want to live differently from them is an uncomfortable leap for a lot of people, one that’s much easier to ignore...especially for people whose careers require them to live in a fantasy world.

I don’t know if Hollywood as a whole is waking up to reality yet, but more and more sensible Westerners are, and there are bound to be some entertainers among them.

Frankly, it gives me a little hope that we might someday find the fortitude required to face this enemy directly and act relentlessly to defeat it.

Unfortunately, that day is still very far off.

16 August 2006 @ 9:09AM >> Meet Kevin Holder.

16 August 2006 @ 12:07AM >> Think there aren’t any supporters of terrorism right here in the United States? Think again.

Unfortunately, this scene is quite familiar to me.

15 August 2006 @ 12:47AM >> London’s Daily Mail reports:

A five-year-old girl’s passport application was rejected because it shows her bare shoulders and might offend Muslims.

Hannah Edwards’s mother Jane, a Sheffield GP, was told that her daughter’s exposed skin may be considered offensive in a Muslim country.

The photograph was taken in a booth at a local post office for a family trip to the south of France.

However, when the family presented it at the post office with the completed form, they were told it would not be accepted by the Passport Office.

Mrs Edwards said she was furious when a woman behind the counter said she was aware of at least two other applications that had been rejected because a person’s shoulders were not covered.

Mrs Edwards said: “I was incensed. I went back home and checked the form. Nowhere did it say anything about covering up shoulders. If it had, I would have done so, but it all seems so unnecessary.

[...]

A spokesman for the Identity and Passport Service said it was not its policy to reject applications with bare shoulders.

“Our offices have a Passport Office template which says which says what the photograph should and shouldn’t be. Bare shoulders don’t come into that at all.

“It is the first time we have heard of such a rejection and we will take it up with that particular office.”

14 August 2006 @ 10:31PM >> Last week, Senator Joseph Lieberman lost the Democratic Primary in Connecticut. In effect, he’s been booted out of his own party, no longer able to run for Senate under the label “Democrat.”

The Democrats in Connecticut excommunicated Lieberman because he was seen as being too supportive of President Bush’s foreign policy. So, the Democrats’ former Vice Presidential nominee will now be running as an independent in order to keep the seat that he’s held since 1988.

After it became clear that Lieberman was no longer considered a Democrat in good standing by Connecticut’s voters, I argued that it was “a great loss for Connecticut, for Democrats, and for America.”

Brain Terminal reader Keith Leonard disagrees with the level of importance that I and others have placed on the outcome of the election:

Although Lieberman lost it was only by a close margin (52-48).  I keep hearing from pundits, and you, that this is a resounding victory for the anti-war left.  On the contrary, I think it shows that the Democratic party, at least in Connecticut, is split on the issue.  I think the ‘reasonable’ left (as opposed to the radical left) deserves more credit.

It’s true that the election was not a landslide, but that doesn’t mean that the results are insignificant. The pacifist left has shown that they now have enough power in the Democratic party to knock off a guy who, just six years ago, was respected enough within his own party to be nominated for Vice President. There’s no question this is a turning point.

When one faction within a party achieves dominance over another, that’s significant. Perhaps the reasonable left deserves credit for being reasonable, but they can’t claim credit for controlling the Democratic party, at least not in Connecticut. The reasonable left lost to the pacifist left. There’s no other way to put it. And if anyone should doubt whether the reasonable Democrats lost, just look at the latest Rasmussen poll to come out of Connecticut:

Half (52%) of Lamont voters believe Bush should be impeached and removed from office. Just 15% of Lieberman voters share that view.

More than half of the Democrats in Connecticut who just voted to remove Senator Lieberman from office also believe that President Bush should be impeached. That’s a pretty big bloc of Democrats, and if this bloc represents the new power base of the Democratic party, then they should put their money where their mouths are and try to play that hand.

For a long time, the Democratic party leadership has gotten away with a double game: criticize everything about President Bush’s handling of the war on terror, but don’t offer any solutions of their own. They know that if they offer specifics, those can be criticized as well. But they want to avoid that criticism, so they keep quiet when it comes time to suggest alternatives.

If the Democrats are this cowardly in fighting the war of words that surrounds the war on terror, how can anyone expect them to effectively fight the war on terror itself?

The Connecticut primary shows that the pacifist wing of the Democratic party is on the rise. And if they should ever find themselves holding power in Washington, their first priority would not be to fight the Jihadists whose bombs are exploding all over the world, their first priority would be to impeach the only president who’s made a serious effort to combat those Jihadists. Interesting priorities.

Trying to put President Bush on trial for being too aggressive in fighting this war will tell the rest of America exactly where today’s Democratic party stands. I don’t think they’re politically suicidal enough to try something like that, but if Ned Lamont’s voters had their way, that’s exactly what would happen.

Will the Lamonties have enough influence within the party to push the Democrats towards impeachment after the November elections? Only time will tell.

11 August 2006 @ 8:53AM >> The Quote of the Day, “Should’ve stayed on the weed,” is from Glenn Reynolds, in response to this tidbit about one of the people plotting yesterday’s thwarted terrorist attack:

Neighbors identified one of the suspects as Don Stewart-Whyte, 21, from High Wycombe, a convert who changed his name to Abdul Waheed.

“He converted to Islam about six months ago and grew a full beard,” said a neighbor, who refused to be identified. “He used to smoke weed and drink a lot but he is completely different now.”

10 August 2006 @ 11:44PM >> Since the attacks of September 11th, many Americans have been wondering when the next big attack would come. This morning, America woke up to the news that a coordinated attack—what intelligence officials referred to as “the big one”—might have been thwarted.

Time Magazine reports that the “U.S. picked up the suspects’ chatter and shared it with British authorities,” who then rounded up 24 people who were involved in planning simultaneous attacks on 9 different planes:

Their plan was to smuggle the peroxide-based liquid explosive TATP and detonators onto nine different planes from four carriers — British Airways, Continental, United and American — that fly direct routes between the U.K and the U.S. and blow them up mid-air. Intelligence officials estimate that about 2,700 people would have perished, according to the official.

Britain’s MI-5 intelligence service and Scotland Yard had been tracking the plot for several months, but only in the past two weeks had the plotters’ planning begun to crystallize, senior U.S. officials tell TIME. In the two or three days before the arrests, the cell was going operational, and authorities were pressed into action. MI5 and Scotland Yard agents tracked the plotters from the ground, while a knowledgeable American official says U.S. intelligence provided London authorities with intercepts of the group’s communications.

I’m waiting for the media to start demanding answers from our elected officials: Were these intercepts constitutional? Was anyone’s phone tapped? Were warrants necessary and were they obtained properly?

Sure, 2,700 people might have been saved, but at what cost to our principles?

9 August 2006 @ 5:59PM >> Reuters isn’t the only outfit publishing questionable photos that just so happen to benefit Hizbollah’s propaganda campaign.

One Lebanese woman is shown in two pictures from two different locations taken two weeks apart, but in each picture, she is said to be mourning the destruction of her home:

In the first photograph, taken by Reuters, a woman is seen in front of a bombed out building in Beirut. “A Lebanese woman wails after looking at the wreckage of her apartment, in a building, that was demolished by the Israeli attacks in southern Beirut,” Reuters said in its caption. The photo was dated July 22 2006.

A second photograph of a woman who looks exactly like the woman in the first Reuters image, even bearing the same scar on her left cheek, is then supplied by the Associated Press.

“A Lebanese woman reacts at the destruction after she came to inspect her house in the suburbs of Beirut, Lebanon,” the Associated Press caption claimed. The date accompanying the photograph is August 5 2006, and the scenes behind the woman are different to those of the July 22 photo.

The New York Times also got into the act with a different transgression—but quickly issued a correction after being found out. The correction reads:

A picture caption with an audio slide show on July 27 about an Israeli attack on a building in Tyre, Lebanon, imprecisely described the situation in the picture. The man pictured, who had been seen in previous images appearing to assist with the rescue effort, was injured during that rescue effort, not during the initial attack, and was not killed.

The correct description was this one, which appeared with that picture in the printed edition of The Times: After an Israeli airstrike destroyed a building in Tyre, Lebanon, yesterday, one man helped another who had fallen and was hurt.

I guess the Times figured out that there’s quite a difference between being killed and falling down.

Although the Times corrected this issue quickly, last Saturday, the paper ran a front-page above-the-fold photo from Adnan Hajj, the Reuters photographer busted (and fired) for passing along doctored pictures.

Reuters felt that Hajj’s work was questionable enough to remove all 920 photos he submitted from their catalog, but the Times still has not even mentioned the Reuters photo scandal or otherwise explained the paper’s use of his photos.

9 August 2006 @ 2:16AM >> Is there any room in the Democratic Party for a candidate who is strong on defense and aggressive in the War on Terror? Democratic primary voters in Connecticut have answered that question with a resounding no. Senator Joseph Lieberman—one of the few prominent Democrats who understands the existential threat posed by radical Islam—has just been defeated by a left-wing pacifist named Ned Lamont.

Considering Lieberman was the Democratic nominee for Vice President just six years ago, this is quite a fall. So he’s ditching the party and running as an independent.

Despite the fact that I disagree with Lieberman on a great many issues, he understands the stakes in the only issue that really matters. We can shy away from this clash of civilizations, but that doesn’t mean our enemies will. And if nuclear bombs start going off in American cities—a very real possibility within the next ten years—then political disagreements on things like taxes are going to be meaningless.

I think this is a great loss for Connecticut, for Democrats, and for America. If we’re going to get serious about dealing with the Jihadists, we need more people like Lieberman in both parties. It’s too bad they’re no longer welcome in the Democratic Party.

8 August 2006 @ 2:49PM >> Giant Robot Imprisons Parked Cars

7 August 2006 @ 4:03PM >> Congratulations to Little Green Footballs and the blogosphere in general for once again exposing fraud in the establishment media.

Over the weekend, the Reuters news service—the one that wouldn’t allow the term terrorist to be used when describing the perpetrators of the September 11th attacks—was caught running a doctored photo that tried to make Israeli airstrikes on Hizbollah look broader and more devastating than they actually were.

In one picture, Reuters photographer Adnan Hajj used image manipulation software to make a plume of smoke look much larger. The fake smoke covered nearly the entire frame of the picture, making it appear as if a wider attack had taken place.

The obvious manipulation of that picture led bloggers to start checking other Reuters photos that carried Hajj’s byline. It turns out, this guy’s been busy. Another suspicious photo shows an Israeli military plane launching what are labeled as “missiles.” Three such missiles are shown, although evidence suggests that (1) they are simply flares designed to confuse Hizbollah’s anti-aircraft weaponry, and (2) there was only one such flare in the photograph, but it was replicated twice to make the image look more menacing.

The hyping of Israeli “atrocities” that aren’t seems to be a bit of a pattern in the media. Hizbollah’s propaganda machine is quite effective at getting its message out through the supposedly skeptical editors of the Western media. Hizbollah agents parade dead bodies in front of eager cameramen for the likes of Reuters, and the Western media laps it up and broadcasts it around the world without question.

It’s bad enough that an outfit like Reuters can’t even recognize terrorism for what it is, but it is shameful that Reuters allows itself to be used by terrorists as they try to win the propaganda war. I hope the Western media are simply dupes. To think that they are willing accomplices is simply too depressing.

7 August 2006 @ 3:37PM >> Last week, I wrote:

[T]he Middle East would be much better off if there were more countries like Israel, the region’s only stable, functioning democracy where Jews and Muslims are even allowed to serve side-by-side in the legislature.

A reader responded to point out that the Iranian parliament sets aside one seat for a Jew, who represents the approximately 25,000 Jewish residents of Iran. (Before the Islamic revolution in 1979, some 100,000 Jews lived in Iran.)

As blogger/law professor Eugene Volokh notes:

Naturally, this doesn’t mean that Jews in Iran have equal rights, or are treated well by the government or by fellow citizens — the presence of a non-set-aside Jewish politician would be much better evidence of social tolerance than the presence of a set-aside one — but only that Iran’s Islamic legal system sometimes yields things that are unexpected to the uninitiated.

True indeed.

And while this doesn’t invalidate my original assertion—I don’t think Iran can be rightly called a “stable, functioning democracy“—it was worth noting.

4 August 2006 @ 12:42AM >> The adults in this British town should spend more time hugging their kids and less time hugging trees:

To the 12-year-old friends planning to build themselves a den, the cherry tree seemed an inviting source of material.

But the afternoon adventure turned into a frightening ordeal for Sam Cannon, Amy Higgins and Katy Smith after they climbed into the 20ft tree - then found themselves hauled into a police station and locked in cells for up to two hours.

Their shoes were removed and mugshots, DNA samples and mouth swabs were taken.

Officers told the children they had been seen damaging the tree which is in a wooded area of public land near their homes.

Questioned by police, the scared friends admitted they had broken some loose branches because they had wanted to build a tree house, but said they did not realise what they had done was wrong.

4 August 2006 @ 12:15AM >> Microsoft’s next operating system—Windows Vista—is still not ready for prime-time. At least that’s the view of three prominent Microsoft watchers who have been testing pre-release versions of the system.

Paul Thurrott was once viewed at Microsoft’s main online cheerleader, although he might be losing that title:

I’ve been working with Microsoft OS betas for over 12 years now, and while it’s very clear that Vista hasn’t exactly followed a trajectory that’s at all similar to any of the other betas, it’s also true that each OS beta has its own vibe. We might call Windows Vista a “train wreck” for simplicity’s sake.

Robert McLaws writes:

I’ve been defending Microsoft’s ship schedule for Windows Vista for quite some time. Up to this point, I’ve been confident that Vista would be at the quality level it needs to be by RC1 to make the launch fantastic. Having tested several builds between Beta 2 and today, I hate to say that I no longer feel that way.

And former Microsoft employee Robert Scoble adds:

This sucker is just not ready. Too many things are too slow and/or don’t work. I’ve been on the betas of every Windows OS since Windows 3.1 and Vista is starting to feel good, but it doesn’t feel good enough to release to the factory in October. It feels like it needs a good six more months than that, which would mean a mid-year release next year.

In other news, expect some major announcements from Apple next week.

3 August 2006 @ 5:05PM >> One might even say it’s the final solution:

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said Thursday the solution to the Middle East crisis is to destroy Israel. In a speech during an emergency meeting of Muslim leaders, Ahmadinejad also called for an immediate halt to fighting in Lebanon between Israel and the Iranian-backed militant group Hezbollah.

“Although the main solution is for the elimination of the Zionist regime, at this stage an immediate cease-fire must be implemented,” he said.

So, in other words, the purpose of a cease-fire is just to buy time until “the Zionist regime” can be eliminated. Iran would annihilate Israel today if it could, but it takes time to build a nuke. So the only purpose of a cease-fire would be to protect what remains of Hizbollah; after all, Iran might need them again in the future.

Ahmadinejad, who has drawn international condemnation with previous calls for Israel to be wiped off the map, said the Middle East would be better off “without the existence of the Zionist regime.”

Actually, the Middle East would be much better off if there were more countries like Israel, the region’s only stable, functioning democracy where Jews and Muslims are even allowed to serve side-by-side in the legislature.

Ahmadinejad disagrees. To him, the world simply needs more jihad.

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Note: A point in this post has been clarified since it was initially written.

1 August 2006 @ 3:25AM >> Apparently, Israel’s vigorous war against Hizbollah has weakened Iran’s ability to act in the region. At least that’s what some in Tehran think, according to The New York Times:

In the past, Iran believed that Israel might pause before attacking it because they would assume Hezbollah would assault the northern border. If Hezbollah emerges weaker, or restrained militarily because of domestic politics, Iran feels it may be more vulnerable.

“This was God’s gift to Israel,” said Nasser Hadian, a political science professor at Tehran University and an expert in Iranian foreign policy. “Hezbollah gave them the golden opportunity to attack.”

He said that Iran does not have the military ability at home to fight an aggressive offensive war against Israel from so far away. He said its only offensive tool would be a missile, which he said would be of limited effect and accuracy.

My first reaction is: good.

My second reaction is, an Iranian missile today might only be “of limited effect and accuracy.” But an Iranian missile in a few years, tipped with nuclear material, would be a different story. With a nuke, the missiles don’t have to be terribly accurate to have the intended effect, and that effect would most certainly not be “limited.”

1 August 2006 @ 12:35AM >> Last week in Seattle, a gunman opened fire on a crowd, shooting six people and killing one. On television news, where the rule is “if it bleeds, it leads,” mass shootings typically get massive coverage. And when there’s a motive for the shooting, you usually hear about that, too. We all remember that the Columbine shooters were picked on in school.

But some crimes don’t get quite as much coverage, and when they do, they are often scrubbed of politically incorrect details. So when Naveed Afzal Haq entered the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle and started shooting, it was interesting to see how the story was covered.

Haq, a U.S.-born Muslim, left no doubt about his motives: according to witnesses, he announced, “I am a Muslim American, angry at Israel” before opening fire. Haq later told a 911 operator, “These are Jews and I’m tired of getting pushed around and our people getting pushed around by the situation in the Middle East.”

But despite his own statements, it still wasn’t quite enough evidence for the folks at the Los Angeles Times. On Sunday, two days after the incident, the paper ran a front-page teaser about the story that claimed, “Jewish Center Shooter’s Motive is a Mystery.”

Yeah, what a mystery! Better call in the psychic detectives to get to the bottom of this one.

As a result of such deliberate ignorance, the paper’s number-one online watchdog administers sufficient ridicule. Nicely done, Patterico!