Four Dead in Kiryat Arba

In an unmistakable message to participants in the upcoming Washington Peace talks between Israelis and Palestinians, four people were gunned down tonight at 7:30pm Jerusalem Time in Kiryat Arba, down the road from my house in Efrat. I can hear the siren screams of the security vehicles responding.

The Jerusalem Post reports that two men and two women, one of whom was pregnant, were gunned down at close range in a roadside ambush.

Four Israelis were killed as terrorists opened fire at an Israeli vehicle near Kiryat Arba in Hebron Tuesday evening.

Magen David Adom paramedics arrived at the scene of the shooting and declared all four victims dead; two men aged 25 and 40 and two women aged 25 and 40. Paramedics added that one woman may have been pregnant. All four are residents of the Beit Hagai.

Police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said, "Shot were fired from close range at the vehicle at approximately 7:30 p.m. All four occupants of the vehicle were shot dead. The area has been cordoned off by Border Police, Judea and Samaria Police and the IDF. Security forces are searching for the attackers."

Arutz Sheva reports that the attackers made sure their victims were dead execution style.

Emergency service paramedics could do nothing to save the victims whose bodeis were riddled with numerous bullets. The terrorists reportedly made sure their victims were dead by shooting them from close range after the initial fusillade.

According to initial reports, the victims are members of one family, and one of them is a pregnant woman. The IDF is combing the area, searching for the terrorists.

YNET NEWS reports that when informed of the attack, Palestinian Security Forces assigned the blame to Hamas.

A Palestinian security official said that a Hamas cell is believed to be behind the lethal attacks. He noted that the last attack in the Hebron region, which left an Israeli police officer killed, was also the work of Hamas.

Meanwhile, the Popular Resistance Committees (PRC) told Ynet Tuesday's shooting attack was a message to the Palestinian negotiating team ahead of the resumption of direct talks with Israel.

"They should not have embarked on this move without the support of the Palestinian people," PRC Spokesman Abu Mujahid said. "Our people still espouse the resistance and do not believe in the fictitious talks scheduled to commence tomorrow. "

Following the attack, security forces across the nation were ordered to go on the highest alert ahead of the possibility of further attacks.

For the last several weeks, Palestinian officials have been ramping up their rhetoric in advance of their expected scuttling of the coming talks. As the talks approach, their tone, including that of Abbas, has been increasing in pitch and fervor.

Palestinian Media watch reported that with PA President Abbas in the audience,

PA Minister of Religious Affairs Mahmoud Al-Habbash in his Friday sermon threatened that "Jerusalem can ignite a thousand and one wars" and that unless Jerusalem "returns" to the Palestinians, "its owners," and unless it becomes the capital of the Palestinian people, "there is no peace."

The Minister also warned that "If Jerusalem is dishonored, if Jerusalem is disgraced, if [Jerusalem] is lost, it may leave the door open to all possibilities of struggle, all possibilities of war. The term 'war' cannot be erased from the lexicon of this region as long as Jerusalem is occupied..."

In the meantime, four people are dead in the Gush. So much for partners in peace.

Sarcastic looks now legal offense?

If The Onion had written this, no one would have thought it other than satire. But again, American politics has become indistinguishable from satire:

A few weeks ago, Elmhurst IL city officials ejected a citizen from a public meeting for rolling her eyes, which the city council members deemed a disturbance to the meeting. After consulting with the city attorney, the council this week was upset to find out that eye rolling could in no way be considered a disturbance to a public meeting. After the original incident, the council moved to adopt a concrete definition of public disturbance, commissioning their attorney to develop the definition. The council later stated that they never intended to include eye-rolling in the definition.

But the woman was still ejected.

As the Great November Shakeup approaches ever closer, we'd do well to remember that the Political Class of both parties will do anything to cling to their offices and power.

HT: Michael Silence, via Say Uncle

Five most important bucket list items

The "bucket list" is made up of things someone wants to do before they die, that is, before they kick the bucket. "The Bucket List" was the name of a 2007 movie starring jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman as, "Two terminally ill men [who] escape from a cancer ward and head off on a road trip with a wish list of to-dos before they die."

(Actually, you don't "escape" from a cancer ward. It's not a prison. You just tell the staff you're leaving. See ya, so long, adios, adieu. Then you walk out. But I digress.)

Inspiration and Chai blog has a post about the five most important things to dying people.

For many years I worked in palliative care. My patients were those who had gone home to die. Some incredibly special times were shared. I was with them for the last three to twelve weeks of their lives. ...

When questioned about any regrets they had or anything they would do differently, common themes surfaced again and again. Here are the most common five:

I won't copy and paste the whole post, but I will point out that in my own years in pastoral ministry, and having ministered to more dying men and women than I wish I had to, I think this writer is spot on. Here are his five "regrets of the dying."

1. I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.


2. I wish I didn't work so hard.


3. I wish I'd had the courage to express my feelings.


4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.


5. I wish that I had let myself be happier.

I'll add one myself: "I wish I had been more generous." I have known far too few genuinely generous people. My father in law is one, and so was a man of the first church I served named Wilson Herbert. Generous people die easier, or rather, they come to peace with their terminality quicker. They have not spent their lives grasping and clinging to the things they have, so when it is time to let go of life, they manage that much better. Of course there are other things that matter, too - faith or its lack, for example. But the blogger is right:

It all comes down to love and relationships in the end. That is all that remains in the final weeks, love and relationships.

There are no independent men or women, no matter how we like to imagine ourselves so. The Book of Job quotes Job, enduing the worst kind of suffering, as saying, "Naked I came from my mother's womb, and naked I will depart" this life. But he was wrong. We are born naked, but we died clothed in the love we gave away. At the end, only love matters. And only love lasts. Only love never ends.

"Overwhelmingly white," yes! "Overwhelmingly black," no!

If the words, "overwhelmingly" and "white" did not already exist, the lamestream media would have to invent them to write about the Glenn Beck rally held in Washington, D.C., on Aug. 28. The Daily Caller's Jim Treacher presents, "What they’re saying about the 8/28 rally," and "overwhelmingly white" rolls unimpeded off the keyboards of desperately-looking-for-racists reporters. Three examples:

“Beck says he and his overwhelmingly white followers ‘are the inheritors and protectors of the civil- rights movement.’” — Ben Adler, Newsweek

“A relatively dense and overwhelmingly white crowd stretched from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial out past the Washington Monument.” — Mark Benjamin, Salon.com

“Out in the overwhelmingly white audience ... .Mitch Potter, Toronto Star

Jim ends with one of the most famous quotes from Martin Luther King: "“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”

But that's so last century, don't you know?

Anyway, while Beck and other speakers were holding for at least 250,000 people on the national mall, the rev. Al Sharpton held a counter-rally of "thousands to honor MLK."

Funny, though, that not one single news report has characterized Sharpton's crowd as "overwhelmingly black."

This is not to defend Glenn Beck or co-speaker Sarah Palin (who certainly don't need my defense anyway), As I explained last April, "I don't listen to Beck (tried twice, couldn't handle it), occasionally listen to Rush and I've already posted my opinion of Palin."

It is to observe that the media are guilty of racial profiling. As Donald Douglas puts it, "Leftists Search Desperately for 'Racists' at Restoring Honor Rally." They shouldn't have to look far - try a mirror. As Glenn Reynolds says: "... in my experience, the people who yammer about racism the most tend to be closet racists themselves." As for the participants of the Beck event, well, they are guilty of RWW - "Rallying While White."

But there's always someone who doesn't get the memo.

Honor, shame, the Middle East and the American left

Why is the American Left not merely supportive of Imam Feisal Abdul-Rauf's proposal to build the "Ground Zero Mosque" in New York, but positively subservient to the project's backers?

The reason is, not wholly but in large part, because the American Left operates on a paradigm of an honor-shame system much like that of the Arab lands and of Islam generally. The Left is entirely convinced, because of its neo-Marxist world view, that America has immiserated the rest of the world (there's a good Marxist word for you!) and that, therefore, it is entirely understandable for the rest of the world to resent their immiseration. And if that means that Arab Muslims strike back violently, well, it's regrettable, but really, who can blame them?

In this honor-shame thinking, the United States has exploited Arab lands because of their oil reserves (and the Left just hates oil) and used the Middle East as a chessboard on which Cold War power games were played. This brought dishonor and shame upon America. Therefore, accommodating "creeping sharia" in the United States is one way to restore the balance of honor, as are other symbols of subservience:

April 2009 - President Barack Obama bowing to Saudi King Abdullah, whose country is the main source of terrorist money in the world today.

I first posted an essay back in 2006 that helps illuminate the confluence of Islamist aggression and American Leftism. So here it is again:

HONOR/SHAME, THE MIDDLE EAST AND THE AMERICAN LEFT
By Donald Sensing on October 19, 2006 7:26 PM | 28 Comments

The Gospel of Luke 14:1, 7-24:

14 On one occasion when Jesus was going to the house of a leader of the Pharisees to eat a meal on the Sabbath ... . 7 When he noticed how the guests chose the places of honor, he told them a parable. 8"When you are invited by someone to a wedding banquet, do not sit down at the place of honor, in case someone more distinguished than you has been invited by your host; 9 and the host who invited both of you may come and say to you, 'Give this person your place,' and then in disgrace you would start to take the lowest place. 10 But when you are invited, go and sit down at the lowest place, so that when your host comes, he may say to you, 'Friend, move up higher'; then you will be honored in the presence of all who sit at the table with you. 11 For all who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted."

Jesus's discourse on jockeying for position illuminates the kind of cultural values that Jesus grew up in 2,000 years ago, and which is still found across most of the Middle East today (and, in his renunciation of those values, helps explain why he made such powerful enemies). Cultures of honor and shame are literally foreign to Western minds. Matters of honor and shame have certainly been powerful in Western history, but such concerns have always been tempered and tamped by Jesus's teachings that "all who exalt themselves will be humbled." And the twentieth century's blood-drenched years did nothing to preserve the concept, either. Jonathan Rauch, writing in National Journal, explains,

Singularly, however, the West has backed away from honor. Under admonitions from Christianity to turn the other cheek and from the Enlightenment to favor reason over emotion, the West first channeled honor into the arcane rituals of chivalry, then folded it into a code of manly but magnanimous Victorian gentlemanliness -- and then, in the 20th century, drove it into disrepute. World War I and the Vietnam War were seen as needless butcheries brought on by archaic obsessions with national honor; feminism and the therapeutic culture taught that a higher manly strength acknowledges weakness.

He goes on to explain that in Arab culture, one's standing in the community is of paramount importance. What Easterners call "saving face" is a real force in the Middle East. Why else, Rauch asks, would Saddam lie about possessing wmds, knowing that the lies could bring about his downfall and demise? "Saddam was more concerned about saving face -- preserving his reputation for being fierce and formidable -- than about his office or even his life. Indeed, he could not feel otherwise and still count himself a man."

The Middle East Quarterly explains the essence of the honor/shame culture:

[I[n traditional Arab society ... a distinction is made between two kinds of honor: sharaf and ‘ird. Sharaf relates to the honor of a social unit, such as the Arab tribe or family, as well as individuals, and it can fluctuate up or down. A failure by an individual to follow what is defined as adequate moral conduct weakens the social status of the family or tribal unit. On the other hand, the family's sharaf may be increased by model behavior such as hospitality, generosity, courage in battle, etc. In sum, sharaf translates roughly as the Western concept of "dignity."

Honor, then, is what is granted by the community, by the social units of society. Likewise, shame or disgrace is also so given. I demur, though, that what meq describes at sharaf corresponds, even "roughly," to the Western concept of dignity. A person's dignity comes from self-concept: you cannot rob me of my dignity because of my inherent worth as a human being. The idea of dignity of mankind was a concept that undergirded the American revolutionists and that led Thomas Jefferson to write that, "The God who gave us life gave us liberty at the same time; the hand of force may destroy but cannot disjoin them." In my 2003 essay, "The Coming American Holy War," I explained that the American Civil War pitted the Southern states' honor concepts against the Northern states' dignity concepts.

Holy War from the legacy of the American South is waged from an offense to the nation that is seen as a stain upon the national honor, or as vengeance for wrongs done to the nation. (Southern concern with honor was a major contributor toward both Southern secession and the attack on Fort Sumter, precipitating the worst war in our history.) Honor can be restored only by confronting the foe with great force. The foe's surrender or destruction restores the national honor. Honor codes have not played a large role in shaping the Northern model of of Holy War. Instead, the Northern codes spring from ideas of the dignity of humankind, and deep notions of sin and judgment. From the Northern model, Americans readily answer the call to colors to liberate the oppressed and punish the oppressors, a combination that probably springs from the North's Puritan and Calvinistic founding.

Back to MEQ:

In contrast, ‘ird relates only to the honor of women and its value can only decrease. It translates roughly as the Western concept of "chastity" or "purity." And as with chastity or purity, exemplary moral behavior cannot increase a woman's ‘ird but misconduct reduces it. In addition, ‘ird trumps sharaf: the honor of the Arab family or tribe, the respect accorded it, can be gravely damaged when one of its women's chastity is violated or when her reputation is tainted. Consequently, a violation of a woman's honor requires severe action, as Tarrad Fayiz, a Jordanian tribal leader, explains: "A woman is like an olive tree. When its branch catches woodworm, it has to be chopped off so that society stays clean and pure."

This dynamic, says MEQ, explains "honor killings" in Muslim societies, but especially Arab ones, in which a woman whose chastity has been compromised, even by rape, is punished.

As for rape, society perceives the violated woman not as a victim who needs protection but as someone who debased the family honor, and relatives will opt to undo the shame by taking her life. Failure to do so further dishonors the family.

Rape in such societies is not held to be principally an offense against the woman, as it is in the West, but against first the men of her family and secondarily the other women, whose reputation for chastity can be sullied by libertine ways of one. Because it is not really dishonorable for a man to commit rape as much as for a woman to endure rape, things like this occur:

On May 31, 1994, Kifaya Husayn, a 16-year-old Jordanian girl, was lashed to a chair by her 32-year-old brother. He gave her a drink of water and told her to recite an Islamic prayer. Then he slashed her throat. Immediately afterward, he ran out into the street, waving the bloody knife and crying, ‘I have killed my sister to cleanse my honor.' Kifaya's crime? She was raped by another brother, a 21-year-old man. Her judge and jury? Her own uncles, who convinced her eldest brother that Kifaya was too much of a disgrace to the family honor to be allowed to live."

The psychologist who uses the nom de blog of Dr. Sanity explained in Shame, the Arab Psyche, and Islam, that in Arab cultures, the principal concern over conduct is not that which is guilty or innocent, but that which brings honor or shame.

[W]hat other people believe has a far more powerful impact on behavior than even what the individual believes. [T]he desire to preserve honor and avoid shame to the exclusion of all else is one of the primary foundations of the culture. This desire has the side-effect of giving the individual carte blanche to engage in wrong-doing as long as no-one knows about it, or knows he is involved

In contrast, she says, the West has a Guilt/Innocence culture. "The guilt culture is typically and primarily concerned with truth, justice, and the preservation of individual rights."

She illustrates the great difference between the two cultures by this matrix:

The key: if your principal concern about your social self is your standing in your community and what others think about you rather than your own inherent sense of conscience and personal sense of worth, then you are operating on a honor/shame model.

I am wondering whether honor/shame codes play a much larger role for the left side of the American political aisle than is first evident. It was mostly from that side of political aisle that just after 9/11 the plaintive cry was raised, "Why do they hate us?"

To many people in the Middle East and beyond, where US policy has bred widespread anti-Americanism, the carnage of Sept. 11 was retribution. And voices across the Muslim world are warning that if America doesn't wage its war on terrorism in a way that the Muslim world considers just, America risks creating even greater animosity.

Note how the concerns of others is implied to be of supreme importance even in waging war, even if the others are the actual enemy. The Abu Ghraib offenses called forth honor/shame language from all around the aisle.

U.S. military policy was to treat the detainees at the Abu Ghraib facility outside Baghdad in the same manner as enemy prisoners of war. ... For an American soldier, there are few crimes more shameful than breeching the standards of conduct established by the laws of war. ... Nothing will regain the respect of the Iraqis and the world more than doing the right thing in Iraq. That is the most determined response that America can make to the betrayal at Abu Ghraib.

Then there was the entirely false report that copies of the Quran had been abused at Guantanamo, which evoked strong honor/shame language from Western critics, especially on the left:

This is worse than Abu Ghraib; Abu Ghraib represents the physical and psychological torture of a few Muslims, Quran desecration represents a spiritual, emotional and psychological torture of all Muslims. Even if it turns out that the Newsweek report was false, most people will see it as a cover up and another American attempt to eschew accountability.

Note that this author deliberately eschews a guilt/innocence code by claiming that that fact of innocence does not matter. Only the perception of guilt matters. Then he comes to another part of the honor/shame code: rectifying by penance or even debasement of the offender:

The ramifications of mistakes such as this one, even if it is proven that ultimately the report was a false one, will take a long time to rectify. Perhaps Newsweek should dedicate a special issue to celebrate the Quran and the deep devotion that Muslims hold for it.

These words come as no surprise since their author is one Muqtedar Khan, a Muslim teacher in the United States. And it is no surprise that he was writing not for, say, National Review, but for Common Dreams News Center, "Breaking News and Views for the Progressive Commnity." (As for National Review, see this piece on the story and note its concern with truth or falsehood of the allegations, that is, whether the accused is guilty or innocent.)

So is the left side of aisle more concerned with image than with substance, that is with the opinion of others rather than the interior compass of the self? It seems to me to be so. I am not saying that, politically speaking, the right side of the aisle evinces no such conerns - pundits love to wax eloquent about how all politicians need to make sure they are attractive to the base of their party. But it does seem to me that the left side overall acts more within honor/shame frameworks than the right side. If so, it also helps explain why the left side is pretty fast to sympathize with the aggrieved feelings of Muslims generally when it comes to US policy: accusations are more important than evidence.

We gotcher used Rolls Royce rite cheer!

And it's yours for only $5,450!

"Hey, Earl, dint there usta be a car on the trailer?"

"Dunno. Just take thuh pitcher and let's go home."

The Expendables over the top patriotism?

Bill O'Reilly hosted Sylvester Stallone to talk about Sly's new movie, The Expendables. It seems that LA Times blogger Steven Zeitchik said that the movie features, "hard-charging, take-no-prisoners patriotism."

Apple-pie-patriotism already is behind the success of a cable news network and supports large sections of the contemporary country music industry. Why not a film hit too?

Of course, by "a cable news network" Zeitchik meant FoxNewsChannel, so that's what lit O'Reilly's fire. So he invited Stallone onto The O'Reilly Factor to discuss it.



It's obvious to me that Zeitchik never saw the movie (he cites only preview material in his blog post). I have seen it. It's as far from a "patriotic" movie as you can expect a summer-action flick to be.

Normally, I would caution at this point that spoilers follow. However, it's not possible to spoil this movie for someone who hasn't seen it. It's completely predictable and ends exactly as you know it must. That's not a criticism, BTW, because this is, after all, a summer-action pic where the action and wisecracks are more important than the plot and storyline.

The action takes place on the fictional Caribbean island of Velena. The tinpot dictator there, General Garza, is under the thumb of a former CIA operative gone bad, James Munroe, who wants to use Velena as a production center for narcotics. But Bruce Willis, in his 15 minutes seconds of fame in the pic, wants to hire Stallone & Co. (The Expendables, Inc.) to off Munroe.

So Stallone (character name Barney Ross) and costar Jason Statham recon the island. They turn the job down after returning, barely having escaped the recon with their lives. But they can't live with themselves for leaving the Velenans in such tyranny, especially the heroine, Garza's daughter who is working to overthrow her own father. So they all decide to effect regime change free of charge. And, of course, they do.

The point here is this: The Expendables are not fighting for flag and country. They are mercenaries by trade and are not even fighting this time for money. They fight because Stallone wants to rescue Garza's daughter from brutality at the hands of Munroe & henchman. In fact, the main bad guy is an American, CIA no less!

Just how this is "Apple-pie-patriotism" is beyond me.

In fact, this movie is a (pale) re-theme of Sam Peckinpah's classic, The Wild Bunch. Both sets of protagonists are violent men who operate outside the law. In The Wild Bunch they are murdering, thieving criminals (apparently U.S. Army deserters) working for themselves. In The Expendables they are murdering mercenaries working outside the law for hire. Yet at the end both the Wild Bunch and the Expendables set aside monetary gain and go to battle to redeem their own sense of honor and bring down a tyrant. The difference is that the Expendables live to tell the tale.

Both movies are ultra-violent. Peckinpah came under considerable criticism for making what was, until then, the most violent theatrical release ever. Today, The Wild Bunch's violence does not seem so much tame as de rigeur. The Expendables' violence is more graphic though no more pervasive.

But the stories are alike about fighting to redeem one's honor. The Expendables is no more "patriotic" than The Wild Bunch. It's not that either is anti-patriotic, it's just that patriotism or its lack don't figure in the story.

Drudge pins Biden

Drudge Report does it again with stacked headlines:

Don't you love it when a plan comes together?

Collapse of the rental-home market, too?

"The Renting Alternative Will Undermine The Housing Market For Years:"

There is a far-reaching change occurring now which threatens housing markets around the country. A survey conducted by Harris Interactive for the National Apartment Association in May 2010 found that 76% of those surveyed now believe that renting is a better option than buying in the current real estate market, up from 71% in 2008. Especially sobering was the fact that 78% of those surveyed were homeowners.

Because so many homeowners who needed to sell could not, since home sales continue to collapse (unexpectedly!), they have placed their homes on the rental market instead of continuing to bleed cash from an empty house. This is, in fact, what I had to do in 2008 after I moved to another city and my house had sat empty for a full year.

Because homes sales are so low and dropping, a perfect storm of price- and rent-depressing pressures is forming:

1. Home prices continue to decline, meaning that people who can buy a house hold off doing so because they are reasonably reluctant to take on large debt to purchase a depreciating asset. Best to wait, they think, for market bottom than take a chance of buying now and being upside down on loan-to-value as prices keep falling.

2. Mortgage interest rates are lower than they have ever been in real terms, but this boon comes with two clouds around its silver lining. One, it's harder to qualify for a mortgage than before. A mortgage broker recently told me that absent some statutory programs such as VA loan guarantee, if a borrower does not have at least 20 percent to put down and and very good credit score, he simply is not going to write the mortgage, period. The days of easy mortgages are gone for good.

Second, very low interest rates mean that the tax breaks of home ownership are minimized. Interest charged is deductible from pretax income on the IRS Form 1040, but the lower the rate the lower the interest part of the payment. This amounts to a sort of de-subsidy of home buying and if "that which is subsidized increases," then that which is de-subsidized decreases.

3. Economic uncertainty and corresponding lack of job security mean that people who are otherwise motivated to buy refrain. Consider a "roughly 30 year old editor" and her husband when they moved from Boston to Philadelphia. "Clearly, they had the combined income to afford to purchase in the pricy Center City."

Yet they decided to rent even though rents were high. As she explained the decision, "Part of the appeal of being young, urban and childless is the freedom to travel frequently, relocate on a whim, and throw all of our disposable income at shiny new consumables." She went on to ask, "Do I want the responsibility of owning a home? Not in the slightest." Though she admitted that she and her husband might purchase a property, she ended the article by declaring that "Until then, I'll be proudly writing my monthly rent checks."

4. Contrary to conventional wisdom, it is not the low-income people who are mostly defaulting and losing homes to foreclosure. Upper-middle and high-income earners are more likely because they tended to reach for more expensive homes than they thought they could afford over the long term, basing the decision on the expectation that their incomes and home values would grow enough, and quickly enough, to avoid insolvency. They were the most likely to accept "creative financing" or high loan-to-value mortgages and are hence the most likely to find themselves upside down.

That means that an awful lot of the houses now on the rental market are much nicer homes, and in more desirable locations, than before, thus making renting more attractive for increasing numbers of people.

Will the housing market recover to its 2005 level? Well, not in my lifetime.

Understatement of the week

Jake Tapper of ABC News, explaining what President Obama will likely say later this month in a national television address to the nation about Iraq:

President Obama is not expected to address the fact that he opposed the surge of troops in Iraq in 2007. Defense Secretary Bob Gates and Joint Chiefs Chairman Admiral Mike Mullen told me last year that the surge created the conditions allowing the US to withdraw combat troops today.

Linkagery

Two from Glenn Reynolds this morning:



Link. The Democrats took control of Congress in the 2006 election, meaning that they exercised control beginning in January 2007. Federal budgets are enacted a year ahead, so they could not affect the FY2007 budget. But the budgets beginning in FY2008 all belong to the Democrats.

And yet they still blame Bush for the deficits.

Second: Philedelphia is notifying bloggers who live in the city that they have to pay $300 for a business license - whether they are actually making money blogging or not.

Even though small-time bloggers aren't exactly raking in the dough, the city requires privilege licenses for any business engaged in any "activity for profit," says tax attorney Michael Mandale of Center City law firm Mandale Kaufmann. This applies "whether or not they earned a profit during the preceding year," he adds.

So even if your blog collects a handful of hits a day, as long as there's the potential for it to be lucrative — and, as Mandale points out, most hosting sites set aside space for bloggers to sell advertising — the city thinks you should cut it a check. According to Andrea Mannino of the Philadelphia Department of Revenue, in fact, simply choosing the option to make money from ads — regardless of how much or little money is actually generated — qualifies a blog as a business.

To which one commenter logically observes,

Activity for profit? I guess that means the homeless person picking up soda cans better cough up $300. Same for the kid who mows your lawn, your babysitter and your own kids who do household chores for their allowance.

Via American Digest: What is the "Professional Left?"

The term "Professional Left" denotes a growing industry that specializes in converting other people's money into an ideological product, while making a good living out of it in the process.

Read the whole thing. Related: Carol Platt Liebau's dissection the Left's "Corrosive Contempt" for ordinary Americans.

... In their formulation, stupidity, ignorance and bigotry are the only conceivable reasons for opposition to anything they deem moral or just. Their intellectual and personal disrespect for those who disagree with them is breathtaking - and it is unleavened by even the slightest dash of humility.

The irony, of course, is that in its eagerness to denounce the intolerance and shortsightedness of the masses, the liberal elite reveals itself to be . . . shortsighted and intolerant. From the gay marriage case to the Ground Zero mosque debate, the elites don't even offer the courtesy of presenting principled rebuttals of their opponents' arguments. Instead, they dismiss them scornfully as the product of inferior minds, unworthy of consideration by intelligent people.

Will Obama run again in 2012?

The UK Telegraph's Toby Harnden asks, "Does Barack Obama want to be re-elected in 2012?"

Almost everything Obama does these days suggests that he doesn't care much about being re-elected. Strange as it might seem, perhaps he wants to be a one-term president. ...

There are few Americans who see themselves as bigger than the presidency but Obama could well be one of them. In 2008, Obama showed little appetite for the down-and-dirty aspects of political campaigning. ...

It seems highly unlikely that Obama will decide not to run in 2012. But he might well be calculating that a embarking post-presidential role as the leading global thinker in the post-American world as a Republican successor enters office is more attractive than being sullied by the political compromises and manoeuvrings necessary to win.

I wrote earlier this month,

I am finding it less difficult to argue against the proposition that Michelle or her husband either do not expect or do not wish to be in the White House after 2012, and that they are going to milk the office for all the bennies they can get now. Even last October, Edward Bernard Glick wrote that we have, "President Perks." I wrote at the time that his case was overstated. Now I am not so sure.

Remember, the real payoff of being president comes after the incumbent leaves office. Bill Clinton is pulling down a quarter-mil per speech. The cash salary of the president is $400,00 (plus perks out the wazoo, of course). That means that B. Clinton can earn more in a weekend, giving two speeches, than he made in a year as president I (actually, a lot more, since the Congress raised the president's pay effective in 2001).

That Bill served two terms surely elevates his fee over what he would earn as a one-termer. But will this matter with Barack Obama, the first black president? The sky's the limit for him after he leaves office - and Michelle, too, since she will also be in high demand

Remember that Pennsylvania's Democrat Gov. Ed Rendell has already said that Obama will face a challenge in the 2012 primaries. By whom? Well, who do you think?

Creeping Islamism

Former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy explains the relationship between Abdul-Rauf and the source well of modern Islamic radicalism, the Muslim Brotherhood.

It is the Brotherhood’s objective to thread sharia through American law and culture. This mission drives imam Feisal Rauf’s work, as documented by the Center for Security Policy’s Christine Brim in an eye-popping report at Andrew Breitbart’s Big Peace website.

Since 2006, Rauf has been developing the “Sharia Index Project.” His partners in this venture include longtime Muslim Brotherhood honcho Jamal Barzinji, a top official at the International Institute of Islamic Thought. The IIIT, a major backer of the convicted terrorist Sami al-Arian, is one of the Brotherhood satellites that republished Rauf’s book, What’s Right with Islam Is What’s Right with America, the book that was released in Malaysia under the more telling title, A Call to Prayer from the World Trade Center Rubble: Islamic Dawa in the Heart of America Post-9/11. (The other Brotherhood organization behind the republication of Rauf’s book was the aforementioned ISNA.) As Ms. Brim explains, the purpose of Rauf’s Sharia Index Project is “to benchmark” every country’s compliance with sharia, with an eye toward pressuring them to adopt and enforce more.

Dawa is the Arabic word the Muslim Brotherhood uses to mean Islamist infiltration of the west. Its theoretical basis is exactly as McCarthy describes it - "to thread sharia through American law and culture." I stand by what I wrote on Aug. 18:

Do not think for a moment that Abdul-Rauf does not mostly share the same goals as Osama bin Laden. He does. They differ only in means. ...

War, wrote Clausewitz, is politics continued by violent means. Park51, with mosque included, is the reverse: the continuation of jihad by peaceful means. But jihad it is and we'd best understand that the intentions behind it are far from benign.

Dawa is carried out not only through intentional operations such as a a mosque co-located at the WTC center. It is also advanced through the otherwise unaffiliated actions of American Muslims of the sort that Lenin and Stalin, in their own context, called "fellow travelers," those whose sympathies and deeds advance the cause even though they are not formally members of the group, in this case the Brotherhood. Here is an example: "Muslim Woman Sues Disneyland Over Hijab."

A Muslim woman is suing Disneyland acusing the California theme park of refusing to allow her to work in front of customers while wearing a hijab or head scarf. ...

Imane Boudlal filed a discrimination complaint Wednesday with the federal Equal Opportunity Commission.

The Morocco native works in the Storytellers Cafe, a themed Disney restaurant. She says her employer gave her a choice of working behind the scenes or leaving after she began wearing the hijab in observance of Ramadan.

Is Imane Boudlal a member of the Brotherhood? Well, possible I guess, but extremely unlikely. But a victory for her is another checkmark on the sharia index for Abdul-Rauf and the Muslim Brotherhood.

Is the "Ground Zero Mosque" actually a practical joke?

As the media have repetitively reported, the Park51 project, with its included "Cordoba House" mosque, to be built only 600 feet from the World Trade Center site, will cost $100 million.

The project's managers, headed by Imam Feisal Abdul-Rauf, have steadfastly refused to talk about just where the 100 mil is coming from. Foreign donors? What about Iran?

The developers of the Ground Zero mosque are refusing to flat out reject cash for the project from Holocaust-denying Iranian nuke nut Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

“I can’t comment on that” was the reply of mosque spokesman Oz Sultan yesterday when asked specifically if the fund-raising would extend to Iran and Saudi Arabia. "We'll look at all available options within the United States to start."

James Taranto at the WSJ brings up the possibility that Park51 should not be taken as a serious proposal. Citing Politico's report that the project has on hand only about $18,000 as of its 2008 report (the latest available), which is "not enough even for a down payment on the half of the site the group has yet to purchase," James concludes,

If the mosque plan is really this half-baked--it almost sounds like a mere prank--Barack Obama's decision to throw the weight of the presidency behind it is an appalling act of political malpractice.

Well, it is increasingly looking like Park51 may never get off the ground. Certainly it can't get off the ground if it literally lacks the money to buy the ground it intends to get off from.

As has been well reported, Abdul-Rauf first floated this idea in 1999, although not at the present site. If, after the nine years from then until 2008, he and his allies managed to raised only $18,000 after expenses, then in 49,991 more years they will have the $100 million they need.

So Park51 is hardly "shovel ready." And even it if was, there are steadily decreasing numbers of shovels ready to build it.

A growing number of New York construction workers are vowing not to work on the mosque planned near Ground Zero. ...

The grass-roots movement is gaining momentum on the Internet. One construction worker created the "Hard Hat Pledge" on his blog and asked others to vow not to work on the project if it stays on Park Place.

"Thousands of people are signing up from all over the country," said creator Andy Sullivan, a construction worker from Brooklyn. "People who sell glass, steel, lumber, insurance. They are all refusing to do work if they build there."

I don't think that Abdul-Rauf is trying to make a joke. But his team is handling the PR on this project so badly he and it are about to become a joke.

Update: The Daily Beast says that today the Park51 project has less than $9,000 cash on hand.

Marriage - here and gone

Stuart Schneiderman:

Christine Wicker reports that more and more middle aged women are, shall we say, redefining their marriages: "A lot of midlife women in my acquaintance are leaving what appear to be perfectly good and loving husbands. Or thinking about it. Or cheating on them. Or wanting to. Or staying married and faithful but buying their own houses, which they either live in or keep as a bolt hole." ...

Wicker recounts a conversation she once had with an older woman. When the woman explained that it was now time for her to live her "real life," Wicker asked, somewhat incredulously: "What have you been living?" The woman responded: "I've been my children's mother. My husband's wife. Now I'm going to be myself."

What a remarkable statement. And ask yourself where she ever got the idea that when she was a mother and a wife she was not herself. What ideology persuaded her that those roles were alien identities? And if they were alien identities, does that mean that she should feel no sense of accomplishment for having fulfilled them well? Can she now feel no pride in her children because being their mother forced her, against her will, not to be herself?

What is the cause of this? The lack of transcendent focus in one's life.

As Wicker reports, this tendency for women to redefine their marriages unilaterally seems to be far more prevalent among women of more progressive political leanings. Women who have more traditional ideas of gender roles in marriage seem to be happier with their marriages, and are not yearning for their liberation.

But what do "progressives" believe in? Progressivism is essentially self centered and self directed. All their talk about compassion and caring is a smokescreen. Progressivism is at base concerned about power and who wields it. Progressivism is actually all about, well, progressives. Progressives always see themselves as "the new vanguard of the revolution," as Stuart puts it.

This is literally childlike. The mature, socially responsible adult has long outgrown the "me" stage and is comfortable knowing that s/he is not the center of the universe. For progressives, the Self and the Identity are one and the same. If one falls, so does the other. OTOH, non-progressives understand the relationship between Self and Identity but are able to subsume the Self into transcendence without losing their Identity. They can know that they live for higher causes and transcendent purpose while retaining a strong sense of their own individuality.

But this is to say, really, that progressivism believes in Nothing. "Nothing," that is, as an object of belief, well described by David Hart.

And so, at the end of modernity, each of us who is true to the times stands facing not God, or the gods, or the Good beyond beings, but an abyss, over which presides the empty, inviolable authority of the individual will, whose impulses and decisions are their own moral index.

Yet to believe in Nothing is destructive of mind and spirit and ultimately of body and soul. That is why first the Jews and later Christians emphasized self denial. But denying the Self was to renew Identity. Just as Jacob wrestled the angel and was renamed Israel, and Saul the church's persecutor, converted, was renamed Paul, the renewed Identity was (and is) a connected identity, connected with the Creator of all that is and through the Creator with others in new and purer ways.

Not that this is easy, though, nor perfectly achieved even by the most devoted. As Herman Melville's fictional Preacher Mapple put it in Moby Dick,

All the things that God would have us do are hard for us to do - remember that - and hence, he oftener commands us than endeavors to persuade. And if we obey God, we must disobey ourselves; and it is in this disobeying ourselves, wherein the hardness of obeying God consists.

The mark of maturity is the ability to disobey the Self. But this can only be done with a strong sense of Identity. These women walkouts (and male cognates) have never done this. But they can, as soon as they stop believing in Nothing.

Ground Zero mosque about dialog. Not!

The founders and developers of the Park51 mosque, 600 feet from the gaping hole in the ground that used to be the World Trade Center complex, say that the project's mission is to:

• Uphold respect for the diversity of expression and ideas between all people 

• Cultivate and embrace neighborly relations between all New Yorkers, fostering a spirit of civic participation and an awareness of common needs and opportunities 

• Encourage open discussion and dialogue on issues of relevance to New Yorkers, Americans and the international reality of our interconnected planet.

There are other bullets that follow, but those are the first three. Now, compare and contrast those bullets with this report from NBC New York:

The developers of an Islamic cultural center that would include a mosque near Ground Zero have rejected Gov. David Paterson's offer to help them find a different site.

Paterson said today the group is apparently committed to building in the proposed site. "I think they would like to stay where they are, and I certainly respect that and I certainly respect them," Paterson said.

But, Paterson said the dialogue would have been useful as the project has ignited nationwide debate over freedom of religion and anger over the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. "Having said that, how much more foresighted would it have been if the Imam who is the developer of the project had been willing to hear what we are actually talking about?"

Well, guv, maybe it's starting to occur to you that you've been rolled. With rare exceptions, of which the mosque is not included, dialog with Muslims is one-sided (theirs). Almost always, their calls for respect, dialog and understanding come down to "dialog for thee but not for me." Islam is inherently militaristic, triumphalist and imperialistic.

That Park51's program manager, Imam Feisal Abdul-Rauf, is not a terrorist does not somehow mean that these descriptions do not apply to him. Of course, "is not a terrorist" is faint praise these days, since Abdul-Rauf has steadfastly refused to renounce or denounce terrorist acts done by Muslims and has likewise refused to characterize violent Muslim extremist groups, including Hamas, as terrorist.

The upshot? Abdul-Rauf is building a mosque almost touching the site of the terrorist, mass-murder of almost 3,000 people by 19 Muslims, done in the name of Islam, and Abdul-Rauf refuses to characterize the act as terrorism. Do not think for a moment that Abdul-Rauf does not mostly share the same goals as Osama bin Laden. He does. They differ only in means.

But that should give us less comfort than one might think. Because Islam is fundamentally coercive and absolutist, the Cordoba House (the mosque part of the Park51 project) will serve only as the training ground for militant Islamists to operate inside North America. The symbolic value of the compound to Muslims around the world - and especially to Muslim converts here - is beyond measure: a mosque and Islamist training ground standing literally atop the debris field of the 9/11 attacks.

Ralph Peters wrote today,

Well-meaning Westerners are quick to point out that jihad doesn't have to be violent. That's true. Jihad expands Islam's domain by any means available.

The 13-story mosque complex to be built a home-run's length from Ground Zero is jihad--not a gesture to promote inter-faith tolerance.

We are also told that we must be sensitive to the feelings of Muslims. This, too, is true. But isn't it equally true that Muslims should be sensitive to non-Muslims?

Well, Ralph already knows the answer, and it is, "No, Muslims do not have to be sensitive to non-Muslims." Islam is supremacist and formally acknowledges no equals, only inferiors. Abdul-Rauf is not in the slightest concerned about the feelings of Americans, of whom about 70 percent oppose this project. What he is concerned about is victory.

War, wrote Clausewitz, is politics continued by violent means. Park51, with mosque included, is the reverse: the continuation of jihad by peaceful means. But jihad it is and we'd best understand that the intentions behind it are far from benign. As Roger Kimball points out,

Islam is fundamentally incompatible with "foundational Western values like free speech, the separation of church and state, and equality under the law. Such things are not simply missing from Islam: they are positively repudiated by Islam."

Update: There are a small number of Muslims to understand the broader scope of the issue and are publicly opposing the location of Park51. For example, Abdul Rahman Al-Rashed, "the general manager of Al -Arabiya television [and] former editor-in-chief of Asharq Al- Awsat, and the leading Arabic weekly magazine." Al-Rashad thinks the project is a very bad idea for three main reasons. First, there was no mosque there to begin with, second there are no Muslims in New York who need to be served by the project at the intended location. Third, it's really bad PR for Islam for "a mosque being built over the corpses of 3,000 killed US citizens, who were buried alive by people chanting God is great, which is the same call that will be heard from the mosque."

Would there were more voices like his.

Update, Aug. 20: I am always willing to consider compelling counter-arguments, so I link to Cathy Young's piece, "Reality Check in the Ground Zero Mosque Debate."

Obama loses the Los Angeles vote

Gateway Pundit:

Woah! Nice work Ace…

Obama traveled to Los Angeles last night for a fundraiser at the home of a wealthy Hollywood producer and managed to [alienate] the entire city after locking up traffic for hours.

The LA Times coverage of the jam has comments of readers saying that they were stuck, stock still, on freeways and main thoroughfares for hours when they were just trying to get home.

The tone: Just read these, especially the third one.

The coming worldwide American empire

An observation:

Due to the poor performance of the Iraqi forces, the real war capacity of the US force was not fully manifested in the Iraqi War. The strongest points of the US army included their capacity in electronic warfare, in New Concept Weaponry System and Sky Forces, and only a small fraction of those capacities were mobilized. The US was listed 1st in the following three realms in today’s world. First, it was the forerunner in the new military revolution. If we compared the revolution with a long-distance race, the United States would not only take it for granted that it be the one leading all other players, but it would remain 1000 meters ahead of its immediate pursuers—and, if it felt that the distance between it and the second runner might shorten to 900 meters, it would feel threatened. Second, its defense expenditure was the highest in the world— the amount equaling that of the following 12 countries. Thirdly, its military power is incomparable in the world. What was more upsetting was that the US Armed Forces were still expanding rapidly. A new war system covering the whole globe would come into being once its global missile defense system are ready. The last resort by which its enemy might threaten the U. S.—nuclear weapons—would by then be useless. By that time, a unipolar political system backed by an absolute military power—a global empire system with the United States at the core—would then be in place. Just as the mechanized blitz expedited the “Third Reich ” of Adolf Hitler, the information war is now laying the foundation of the world’s new empire. The long-term outcome of this war is terrifying. And though that particular day had not arrived yet, we are fast approaching it.

Who said that? Chinese Lt General Liu Yazhou, newly promoted Political Commissar of China's National Defense University.

Hat tip: Lt. Col. John Krenson, via email.

The Alinsky-ing of the media continues

They told me that if I voted for McCain there would be secret meetings between the president and the media. And they were right!

In October of last year I posted, "Attack on Fox News right out of Alinsky playbook," an analysis of the White house press office's overt attacks against Fox News Channel.

The post's title came from the teaching of Barack Obama's mentor, Saul Alinsky, who in his book, Rules for Radicals, wrote that one of the rules of "power tactics" is to, "Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it."

I observed,

The White House wants the other media to think that its fight is with FoxNews exclusively, hoping they won't see that the real fight is with all media.

The other media may expect to be flattered as "real" reporters and news organizations who are actually the ones being "fair and balanced." The more a White House reporters and editors toe the White House line, the greater access they will be granted, especially to power figures such as Rahm Emmanuel, David Axelrod and, ultimately, Barack Obama himself ... . Reporters who don't fall into place will discover they are being frozen out of access and will have to rely exclusively on press briefer Robert Gibbs, which is the kiss of death to a White House reporter.

And so it has come to pass. First a Drudge headlinette:

And the story thereto, "Which White House reporters had lunch with Obama?" on The Upshot:

Reporters wouldn't say Thursday who joined President Obama for an off-the-record lunch at the White House. ...

Here's the lineup: Ben Feller (Associated Press), Jonathan Weisman and Laura Meckler (Wall Street Journal), Michael Shear and Scott Wilson (Washington Post), Caren Bohan (Reuters), David Jackson (USA Today), Carol Lee (Politico), Peter Nicholas (Tribune Co.), Margaret Talev (McClatchy) and Julianna Goldman (Bloomberg).

Several reporters on this list gave "no comments" to The Upshot on Thursday.

The New York Times was invited but did not attend. White House reporter Peter Baker told The Upshot that the paper "politely declined because we'd like very much to talk on the record."

I hate to say I told you so, but I ... oh, forget it.

So the New York Times reporter had the integrity to say no. How about that?

PS - The WSJ's OpinionJournal picked up on my Alinsky post and ran with it, with editor James Taranto adding commentary of his own along those lines in, "Rules for Presidents."

Another brick in the Obama wall

(link) No doubt the decision was taken in secrecy.

The new Office of Presidential Transparency will be located here:

And this is the office's new graphic logo:

Anchor babies on the increase

USA Today:

The total number of children in the USA born to illegal immigrants on U.S. soil jumped to 4 million in 2009, up from 2.7 million in 2003, a report released Wednesday estimates.
Those children — who are automatically granted U.S. citizenship — represent 5.4% of all children under the age of 18 in the U.S. That compares to 3.7% six years earlier, according to data from the non-partisan Pew Hispanic Center. That percentage will continue rising, as an estimated 340,000 of the 4.3 million babies born in the U.S. in 2008 alone — about 8% — came from illegal immigrant parents, the report says.

The study comes as some legislators, including Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., are calling for a revision of the 14th Amendment that grants citizenship to anyone born in the United States.

The body of the Constitution does not say that anyone born inside the borders of the US is automatically a citizen. "Birthright" citizenship comes from the 14th Amendment, ratified in 1868 with the aim of ensuring that freed slaves and their children would not be denied rights of citizenship:

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.

The phenomenon of "anchor babies" come not from the 14th Amendment but from 1965's Immigration and Naturalization Act. The reason, according to NPR, was because,

The central purpose of the new immigration law was to reunite families.

Until President Johnson signed the act into law, immigrant visas were governed by the Immigration Act of 1924. By the early 1960s, this act was seen to have its own set of problems which are not terribly relevant to this discussion, but for which there was broad agreement on the need to address.

As is almost always the case with legislation, the 1965 act's crafters and supporters - and even LBJ himself - did not foresee the enormous demographic shift in America that the law would bring about.

It leveled the immigration playing field, giving a nearly equal shot to newcomers from every corner of the world. The ceremony was held at the foot of the symbolically powerful Statue of Liberty. Yet President Johnson tried to downplay the law's significance.

"This bill that we will sign today is not a revolutionary bill. It does not affect the lives of millions," Johnson said at the signing ceremony. "It will not reshape the structure of our daily lives or add importantly to either our wealth or our power." ...

[I]n debating an overhaul of immigration policy in the 1960s, many in Congress had argued that little would change because the measure gave preference to relatives of immigrants already in America. Another provision gave preference to professionals with skills in short supply in the United States.

No one foresaw that within 30 years, Europe would become the junior supplier of professional-class immigrant applicants to America, as professional classes emerged strongly in India, across Asia and even in China.

But the main thing was the family-reunification provision. Only a year after the act was signed, the immigration service published an internal-use booklet prescient in its forecast:

It explains how each provision in the new law would lead to a rapid increase in applications and a big jump in workload — more and more so as word trickled out to those newly eligible to come. [Historian Marian] Smith says a lifetime of immigration backlogs had built up among America's foreign-born minorities. These immigrants would petition for relatives to come to the United States, and those relatives in turn would petition for other family members.

The result? Since 1965, and accelerating since the mid-1980s, the demography of the United States has changed in ways that the 1965 act's sponsors would have thought impossible at the time. And the Congress of the United States has simply lost - or acceded - control the the nation's immigration policy to other countries, especially Mexico, or to immigrants themselves. NPR explains:

[T]he chief driver of this change remains the system of family-based immigration put in place in 1965. Over time, in a process critics call "chain migration," entire families have re-established themselves in the United States. Historian Otis Graham thinks the policy has been a terrible mistake.

"Family reunification puts the decision of who comes to America in the hands of foreigners," Graham says. "Those decisions are out of the hand of the Congress — they just set up a formula and its kinship. Frankly, it could be called nepotism."

The Republicans are right: it is time for the Congress to reassert its authority over immigration into this country. It's time to end anchor babies opening the door to dozens of relatives automatically qualifying for immigration rights. The best place to begin is with defining which births invoke automatic citizenship and which do not. This will not necessarily require a Constitutional amendment, since the 14th Amendment concludes, "The Congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article."

But whether by amendment or legislation, I commend again to your attention my own "fix" on what an amendment or act should say: "14th Amendment and "birthright citizenship".

Motowns's finest

They don't make singing groups like this any more - The Temptations on stage with The Four Tops:



More at Great American Things.

"Most dangerous trojan virus ever"

That's what British cyber-security experts are calling a piece of malware that has cleaned hundreds of thousands of pounds sterling from British bank accounts.

About 3,000 online banking customers have been victims of a computer virus attack that empties their accounts while showing them fake statements so the scam goes undetected.
Experts have described the attack using a 'trojan' virus as the most sophisticated and dangerous malware program ever created.

The cyber criminals stole an estimated £675,000 between July 5 and August 4 and the attack is still progressing, experts warn.

The latest virus is a variant of the Zeus trojan banking virus which first emerged three years ago and is called Zeus v3.

M86 Security said: ‘We’ve never seen such a sophisticated and dangerous threat. Always check your balance and have a good idea of what it is.’

The scam was discovered after M86 gained access to the command-and-control server in Eastern Europe running the thefts.

It collects data such as passwords and even transfers money out of accounts automatically, but only after checking if there is at least £800 available.

This is malware the resides on personal computers, not on the banks' mainframes. So sophisticated is the virus that it even creates false electronic bank statements to conceal the thefts.

So where is the money going? From security firm M86's discovery that the C2 server is in Eastern Europe, it seems obvious that the transfers winds up in a former Soviet-bloc state, probably in the hands of the Russian mafia or a similar east Europe gang.

But the thought chills at one possibility of the money's eventual destination. Al Qaeda, which is re-recruiting US-backed Sunni tribesmen called the Sons of Iraq:

Al-Qaida is attempting to make a comeback in Iraq by enticing scores of former Sunni allies to rejoin the terrorist group by paying them more than the monthly salary they currently receive from the government, two key US-backed militia leaders have told the Guardian.

They said al-Qaida leaders were exploiting the imminent departure of US fighting troops to ramp up a membership drive, in an attempt to show that they are still a powerful force in the country after seven years of war. ...

Sheikh Sabah al-Janabi, a leader of the Awakening Council – also known as the Sons of Iraq – based in Hila, 60 miles south of Baghdad, told the Guardian that 100 out of 1,800 rank-and-file members had not collected their salaries for the last two months: a clear sign, he believes, that they are now taking money from their former enemies.

"Al-Qaida has made a big comeback here," he said. "This is my neighbourhood and I know every single person living here. And I know where their allegiances lie now."

The Sons of Iraq grew out of a series of mini-rebellions against militants associated with al-Qaida that started in late 2006.

Is there a connection between the bank thefts and the fact that al Qaeda is so flush with cash? Probably not. But it also may too coincidental to be a coincidence.

Why is this man smiling?

"Mr. President, we've got your number!"

From American Digest, citing the WaPo's Dana Milbank's characterization of Obama as a "12-year-old president."

"On War: Seven Years of War in Iraq"

The Denver Post has a series of truly outstanding photo essays published earlier this year but still more the relevant. Start here: Iraq.

Other photo essays:

• On War: Joe Rosenthal & Iwo Jima
• On War: Bodies misidentified, misplaced at Arlington
• On War: Military Chaplains in Afghanistan
• On War: Medical Teams Treat The Casualties of War in Afghanistan
• Captured: The Pacific and Adjacent Theaters in WWII
• On War: The dropping of the Atomic Bomb, 65 years later
• On War: Korean War 60th Anniversary
• Captured: The 15th Anniversary of the Oklahoma City Bombing
• Captured: A Look Back at the Vietnam War on the 35th Anniversary of the Fall of Saigon

Bishop with a corkscrew?

Bad Vestments blog:

Ladies and gentlemen!! Give it up for the world's first Swiss Army bishop!!

Michelle is failing her husband

It's not I who says that, but Maureen Dowd - yes, that MoDo! -on the First Lady's Marie Antoinetteish vacation at a millionaire's playground in Spain.

[S]he’s mocked by a New York Daily News blogger as a jet-setting, free-spending Marie Antoinette. (On Spain’s Costa del Sol with Sasha on her husband’s 49th birthday, she did, in effect, say let him eat cake — alone.) ...

She seemed to be gigging her husband a bit: I’m going to do what I want to do. I can’t worry about whether it gives the Tea Partiers ammo or makes Democrats (including you) campaigning against the excesses of the rich look hypocritical. Even if the country is sliding into a double-dip recession, I’m going abroad to a five-star hotel on Air Force Two and give a boost to another country’s economy. ...

When the BP oil spill stained the White House, making the president seem so impotent that he had to make his first national address from the Oval Office, the first lady was playing with her mother and daughters in Los Angeles, staying at the Beverly Wilshire. She was taking in a Lakers game the night of his address.

During the campaign, Michelle tried to offset her husband’s existential detachment with familial warmth. Now that he holds the world’s loneliest office, he needs that more than ever.

I am finding it less difficult to argue against the proposition that Michelle or her husband either do not expect or do not wish to be in the White House after 2012, and that they are going to milk the office for all the bennies they can get now. Even last October, Edward Bernard Glick wrote that we have, "President Perks." I wrote at the time that his case was overstated. Now I am not so sure.

Remember, the real payoff of being president comes after the incumbent leaves office. Bill Clinton is pulling down a quarter-mil per speech. The cash salary of the president is $400,00 (plus perks out the wazoo, of course). That means that B. Clinton can earn more in a weekend, giving two speeches, than he made in a year as president I (actually, a lot more, since the Congress raised the president's pay effective in 2001).

That Bill served two terms surely elevates his fee over what he would earn as a one-termer. But will this matter with Barack Obama, the first black president? The sky's the limit for him after he leaves office - and Michelle, too, since she will also be in high demand.

If After the Democrats get decimated at the polls in three months, President Obama will immediately become, functionally, a lame duck, a fate he only narrowly avoided already. I won't be surprised if he, like LBJ in 1968, simply announces he's not running for reelection.

I'm not predicting this, mind. I just foresee it as possible. What will be the major dertiminant is whether the Congressional Republicans will do enough between 2010 and 2012 to earn voters' trust enough to make Obama's reelection prospects dim enough to drive the decision. And since it's Republicans we're talking about, I'm not calling that.

"Hiroshima Day" - World Council of Churches gets it wrong again

It's past time for Western churches to stop treating Japan as victim every Aug. 6 and 9.

I know this is a "dog bites man" kind of story, but once again the World Council of Churches has got it wrong with, "Prayers for Peace and Justice on Hiroshima Day."

Let me be clear. I certainly have no problems with prayers for peace and justice. I pray them myself. But the order of remembrance (at the link) promulgated by the WCC is not one that I can in good conscience lead. One reason why is the inclusion of a, "Reading of an eye witness account from Hiroshima," adapted from an account by Murakami Toshio. It is a compelling account, and what he endured was dreadful beyond description. I gainsay that not. But the reading's conclusion is unacceptably incomplete:

We, the people of Hiroshima, crushed by nightmares, exasperation, resignation and hardships, have come to hate war, more than any other people, and above everything else. We have eagerly sought for peace, being so urged from the bottom of our hearts, from our very innermost core. ...

I would like to know whether Mr. Toshio hates that war equally from its beginning as from its end. Does he hate what his country did to Nanking as much as what America did to Hiroshima? After all,

When Japanese forces conquered Nanking, for example, they killed at least 200,000 civilians and probably as many as 300,000 over a six-week period (or so) beginning in mid-December 1937.

Japanese atrocities in Nanking were so terrible that Nazi Germany's Consul to the city personally intervened to save hundred of Chinese, especially women, tens of thousands of whom Japanese soldiers gang-raped and then, usually, murdered.

The list of Japanese atrocities during the war - which it started many years before it attacked Pearl Harbor - is literally too long to list here. For example, During America's campaign to liberate the Philippines, the Japanese command declared Manila to be an open city, a term in international law with the specific meaning that it would not be defended and American forces could occupy it unopposed. This was treachery and deceit: the Japanese defended the city fiercely, resulting in the deaths of 100,000 Filipino civilians. The city itself was devastated just as completely as either Hiroshima or Nagasaki.

During 1945, a half million civilians under Japanese occupation were being killed or dying every month because of the occupation.

Japan has never come to grips with its actions and has deliberately refused to face them. Germany, at least, went through such self examination after World War II, and indeed, repentance, that its Nazi past, though not erased, no longer strongly stains the nation of today. Indeed, Germans today have understood their special, historical obligation to face their past honestly and to stand for better angels of human nature today.

Japan, murderer of at least as many people as the Nazis, has never done this and will not do this. Its many years of atrocities: concentration camps, its biowar experiments on Chinese civilians, its deliberate programs of starvation and murder of prisoners, the rapacious pillaging of conquered cities and their peoples, its impressment of foreign women as sex slaves for soldiers - this and more all swept under the Japanese rug with even the barest pretense of acknowledgement that they ever occurred.

So what, exactly, about the war is it that we are supposed to be so morosely prayerful about every Aug. 6? Aug. 6 and 9 are being used by Japan to play the victim card, and when the West plays along it enables the millions of innocent victims of Japanese bushido militarism to be flushed down the memory hole. But facts are stubborn things. Japan and Japan alone is solely responsible for the Pacific and Asia wars and for America's entry into them. The delusion of the WCC and other Hiroshima apologists is that somehow the war could have ended more gently than by the bombings. But as I explained in, "The atom bombings and Japan's surrender,"

Had President Truman not ordered the atom bombings, the US military could have done nothing but intensify conventional bombing and blockading. Hence, Japan could not possibly have been brought to a gentler end of the war than the ending that occurred. Had fighting continued after early August 1945, additional civilian deaths would certainly have numbered in the many hundreds of thousands and probably in the millions by the end of the year.

More likely, though, is that without the atom bombings, Japan would have become embroiled in civil war, which also would have been lethal beyond estimate. Japanese records show that the overriding fear of Japan's high council was the destruction of the emperor's office and line, and the most serious threat thereto was revolution by the Japanese people themselves. The American blockade was so punishing the people that Japan's internal security service, the Kempei Tai, had soberly concluded that revolution was becoming ever-more possible.

I refuse on principle to pollute God's ears with prayers dedicated only to Hiroshima Day and the dead of those cities while ignoring the tens of millions of Japanese-murdered souls who cry for remembrance, but do not get it, certainly not from the World Council of Churches and its allies who have no loathing but for their own civilization. If the prayers of the WCC's service are to be offered, let them be uttered on Aug. 14, the day Japan announced its surrender, or on Sept. 2, the day the surrender instruments were signed aboard USS  Missouri. Let our churches no longer be accessories to Japan's blood-soaked silence but instead be voices for the  millions of murdered victims of its bloodlust, imperialist militarism.

Update - Richard Fernandez:

[T]ry this quiz. Name the two greatest losses of civilian life in the Pacific war. Hint. In both cases the civilian casualties were greater than Hiroshima’s. In one case the event took place on American soil.

Casualties
Hiroshima 70,000–80,000
Battle of Manila 100,000
Nanjing 300,000

Richard posts these two photos. One is of Manila after the the battle. The other is of Hiroshima. Without cheating, identify which photo is of which city.

Also from Richard's post, the words of a memorial in Intramuros, Philippines, to victims of Japanese atrocities.

This memorial is dedicated to all those innocent victims of war, many of whom went nameless and unknown to a common grave, or even never knew a grave at all, their bodies having been consumed by fire or crushed to dust beneath the rubble of ruins.

Let this monument be the gravestone for each and every one of the over 100,000 men, women, children and infants killed in Manila during its battle of liberation, February 3 – March 3, 1945. We have not forgotten them, nor shall we ever forget.

May they rest in peace as part now of the sacred ground of this city: the Manila of our affections.

“Given enough time and opportunity," writes Richard, "the masters of the narrative will eventually succeed in making the Pacific War all about American aggression.”

Oh, the first photo is of Manila, the second of Hiroshima. Yet you will never see a Japanese delegation sent to Manila to pray for its people on the anniversary of the battle.