The Christopher Hitchens link.
Isaac's comments:The only principles of such Muslims is the total superiority of Islam and the infallibility of their Prophet. In their minds, any freedom that clashes, or any person who disagrees, with these said principles is not worthy of respect. This debate is almost exclusively one-sided. The brave Jordanian who showed reason -- a most remarkable attribute in the Islamic world -- is now behind bars.
I've got an advanced degree in economics, and I'm here to tell you that the official numbers on the U.S. economy are just plain strange.
On the one hand, in the fourth quarter of 2005, GDP growth slowed to a crawl. On the other hand, that had little effect on U.S. labor markets, since the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported on Friday that the economy has generated more than 200,000 net new jobs a month, and that unemployment is now down to 4.7%.
On the one hand, the U.S. trade deficit shows no sign of reversing itself; on the other hand, some economists insist that dark matter is not being counted.
On the one hand, European work fewer hours than Americans. On the other hand, it's possible that Americans have more leisure time than Europeans.
The latest: Time frets on it's cover that we may be losing our edge.
A contest to humiliate Mohammed has been launched not in Texas, not in Israel but in the Netherlands. The Netherlands. Almost inconceivable. A smoldering match in a continent riddled with unassimilated Muslim enclaves. Now the European leaders who staked their careers on political correctness and oleagenous kowtowing to radical Islam find themselves unable to assert themselves. It's a moment when Nicolas Sarkozy or Hirsi Ali may count for more in dampening the anti-Mohammed wave than Chirac or Dominique de Villepin. The key challenge for the leaders of Europe is how to get out in front of their publics; hard because they are so far behind.
Yet the cartoon crisis has been cruelest to radical Islam because it has upset the timetable for the slow demographic conquest of Europe. It forced the crisis before the time was ripe to win an outright trial of strength. And it has deranged the carefully crafted plan to hold Europe politically neutral while the Islamists concentrated their force on their most dangerous enemy, the United States. Unless the Islamists can reverse or at least pause the process of confrontation it will find itself engaged on two fronts, against Europe and the United States simultaneously.
My reactions to the mob rallies, embassy torchings, and death threats provoked by the now infamous Danish cartoons lampooning Mohammed are far too many and intense to sort out in any articulate way.
That does not mean, however, that this is in any manner a difficult moral call. I stand on the side of secularism and the enlightenment and I really don’t care how much the believers in any particular religion are offended or insulted by someone else’s views – or by their heaping ridicule. But what a world our children are facing. I don’t believe that we will see anything except an escalation of the current madness for years to come.
Anyone who doubts the growing threat of Islamic fundamentalism and its more barbaric manifestations best sit down and carefully read the lead stories of this past weekend. Much of the world still resides in darkness and plenty are those who wish to cloak it in even more obscurantist veils.
JM: Totally, and what's interesting, there was a short story in the Chicago Tribune. Rahm Emanuel went out to Ohio for a fundraiser for a Congressional candidate out there, and he was trying to talk about health care and education. And the Democratic activists want to talk about nothing but the war. And Rove and Bush are going to talk about nothing but the war. And so I think the Democrats are doing the same thing they did in '02 and '04. They're going to turn this election, the national issue is going to be Iraq, terrorism, wiretapping, and none of that works to their favor.
HH: Agreed. Earlier this week, you ran an op-ed by Tim Roemer at Realclearpolitics.com. Tell people about that, and who he is, by the way, to set the stage.
JM: Well, Congressman Roemer was a six-term Congressman from Indiana. He was on the 9/11 Commission. He's a pro-life Democrat. He ran for DNC chair and lost.
HH: Didn't lose. He got beaten like a bongo drum.
JM: Well, yeah. Exactly. He got beaten like a bongo drum. But he was trying to make an argument that let's not talk about the legal issue here on abortion, and let's try to work on actually implementing laws or policies that are going to make the reality of having less abortions. And I think it's part of a broader strategy on the Democrat side that they realize that the abortion issue is killing them in national elections.
February 2nd is a significant day for me. On February 2, 1970, I arrived at the Great Lakes Naval Training Center. They told us that the windchill was 69 degrees below zero. It seemed cold enough that it might have been true
I had enlisted in the Navy in September 1969 to keep from going to Viet Nam as a draftee. My younger brother was probably on his way home by then. He had enlisted in the Marines in the Spring of 1968, and spent 17 months in country, almost all of it in the north, near the DMZ.
When I arrived, I had a rookie Company Commander (recruit trainer). He made the mistake of making me the RPOC (pronounced "Are-Pock"), because I had college. That was quickly corrected, and I ended up getting sick with a 104 temperature that set me back two weeks. I ended in in BTCS Biby's company, which was a very good thing. I sailed through the rest of Boot Camp, under his experienced control.
After Boot Camp, I went to "Beep School" (Basic Electricity and Electronics). I started to prosper, and went on the the Electronics Technician "A School", as an ETN, picking up "Third Class" after the first portion. While there, I applied for the NESEP program. When I finished, I was shipped off to Greenbury Point, across the river from the Naval Academy. In the Spring of 1972, I found out that I had been selected for NESEP. The people I worked with were amazed, as I was struggling as a technician. My chief petty officer, after hearing of my selection, told me that I could "fall into a pig pen and come out smelling like rose" (or words to that effect).
I eventually got through Purdue and went to OCS in Newport, RI. I was commissioned and then sent to Surface Warfare Officers School. From there, I was sent to the USS Franklin D. Roosevelt (CV-42). You might have shaved with a piece of the Roosevelt, as she was decommissioned and broken up in the latter 1970's.
I eventually picked up Lieutenant on active duty and then Lieutenant-Commander in the reserves, before I bailed. I am not sorry that I had the experience, as I grew and prospered in the process.
No more clearer than in the reaction to the Abramoff dung pile. Republicans walk cavalierly around the steaming dump right in front of them saying “they all do it.” Democrats, meanwhile, gleefully point to a “Republican culture of corruption” and pretend not to notice the stink in their own quarters.
Both sides are half-right. And half-wrong. The Abramoff scandal is strictly a Republican affair. The “culture of corruption” is, however, fully bi-partisan. Here’s my riff on that theme as it appears in my latest L.A. Weekly column.
Once again, the evidence for the failure of emergency relief in Louisiana keeps pointing back to the state and local officials who responded without referencing their own emergency plans, who left assets to sink under the flood waters, and who sat around pointing fingers and mouthing off to the cameras instead of doing their jobs. Their refusal to ask for federal help -- indeed, for telling the feds that no help was necessary -- cost dozens of lives.
These investigations will not make Ray Nagin or Kathleen Blanco look good. If the Exempt Media gives it any kind of coverage at all, it will recast the Katrina relief story significantly, and to the detriment of their reputations.
