The Last Ephor

Dems - Dangerous On National Security . You do not trust the keys to the vault to the guy who lets his friends in when it suits his purposes. How can the Dems honestly tell us they're going to work on "real security" when they can't help but create partisan leaks when needed?

As Europe Grows Grayer, France Devises a Baby Boom . The author makes France sound as if it's bursting with babies. (It may be but a great many of them are Maghreb. Not the stereotypical French family he's reporting on.) Compared to say, Germany, it might be. Demographics is destiny. Western Europe will find itself looking like Dearborne inside a generation. What that means for European identity and political relations I can only guess but I can guess it's not going to be better than than it is now.

Republicans are the party of torture, right? Um, no. Clinton endorses “torture” in special cases . That's a far cry from the wailing and gnashing of teeth we hear from the Left. The point here is not to rehash the torture debate. Rather I want only to point out that if the current president had made such a startling admission, we'd be reading it on every newspaper, blog, and cereal box this side of Mars.

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The woman knows no bounds. She's now taken to wearing a cross. I fully admit my bias here. I think she is the most craven, calculating political animal to run for political office in memory. I don't believe she holds a single view that is not expendible if it meant getting elected. Not one. If she thought wearing a burka would get her elected she'd do it. The bottom dropped out again .

Violence continues unabated and threatens to plunge France into a serious crisis. The only upside is that my fears of a nationalist like Le Pen emerging to wrest control in an "emergency" situation appear dead in the water. Why? Le Pen just made common cause with the French minority population. Forever dooming himself to the margins of French politics. Good riddance.

I hate October because I have been fed to the teeth with political scandal. Everyone spends August and September lining up their poltical hit jobs on their opponents. The newest one today is the Tennessee Democrat party taking tens of thousands of looted pension funds and then refusing to return them. This one is an exception as the embezzler was just arrested on Friday but this is the latest in a long series of attempted "gotchas". Everyone knew about Foley for years and did nothing. Only now, as we're drawing close to the election is the story broken. I don't have the stomach to revisit the rest of them. Unfortuneately, negative advertising works so this will be the way it is forever without end. Combine that with an ever increasing campaign season and I weep for the future.

http://rightwingsparkle.blogspot.com/2006/10/i-gotta-go.html

RADAR magazine compiles a list of our dumbest politicians . It's hard to argue with most of these. I don't think they're all dumb in the conventional sense but some of them are. The others are just dumb in the political sense. (I don't know anything about RADAR magazine, YMMV)

Dean Barnett makes a critical point regarding our intelligence agencies and just how much they understand the region they're supposed to be uniquely informed about. If they can't tell the Shia from Sunni and don't know who is who, how are they supposed to know anything of substance? Even I know the difference and I have nothing to do with anything even remotely approaching national security or any regional specialty. Absolutely amazing.

In From The Cold has a post about casualty rates and what they mean in the broader context of Iraq as well as our upcoming elections. He makes the point that famous battles from WW2 like Midway and Iwo Jima were viewed by their contemporaries as unmitigated disasters. However, in retrospect we see those battles as key turning points in the war that, despite our losses, were critical to winning the war. With the appropriate distance we have objectivity and vastly increased knowledge of the conflict as a whole with which to properly judge a battle. The same thing is happening now. We are fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan and in contemporary terms, we may appear to be losing while making key gains that are as yet unseen. I'm not certain I share this view but I think the point is certainly valid and something we should keep in mind when judging the success or failure of our efforts in the Global War on Terror.

Iraq the Model, points to a video clip of an Iraqi policeman standing firm in the face of an oncoming SVBIED: It's about a police station somewhere in Iraq, the place was about to be hit by a suicide bomber riding a vehicle laden with explosives. The driver approaches the entrance to the station which is surrounded by concrete walls. Several police officers open fire from their ak-47's on the incoming suicide bomber but he keeps closing in. As the vehicle passes through the gate and past the last barricade all of the officers run away seeking shelter…except for one extraordinary man. One police officer held his position and was still standing in the way of the terrorist and kept on firing his rifle at the windshield until the vehicle was just meters from the officer, then…BOOM. End of video…. That's one very brave man. Cool Hand Hamid. Not too many people have the stones to stand firm like that and square off against someone with literally nothing to lose. If we had a di...

Lawyers are like salt. Necessary in small doses but too much leaves a bitter taste in your mouth and ruins the endevor. This is a prime example. Emphasis mine. “One CIA pilot told me that in the mid 1990s, when Clinton was president, that the lawyers began to take over. Previously, they used to take CIA planes into hangars all the time, re-spray them, and come out with a different tail number. That way none of the tracing of CIA planes I’ve been doing since 9/11 would have been possible. The idea of flying around with one tail number for three years would have been thought completely nuts,” Grey told me. “But [Clinton-era] lawyers said they needed to stay legal. They even insisted that, to comply with FAA regulations, they needed stewardesses .” Can you imagine? In what reality are you living when you think that you need a stewardess on board for the transportation of terrorists? What, precisely, would said stewardess do during that flight? This is madness. Madness began by Cl...

I'm curious whom they would go to war against. China? The US? Japan? All three? They're in a bind and they know it. They turned a corner and they can't go back now without serious loss of face. I think Kim badly overplayed his hand.

I'm curious whom they would go to war against. China? The US? Japan? All three? They're in a bind and they know it. They turned a corner and they can't go back now without serious loss of face. I think Kim badly overplayed his hand.

One of my personal failings (no, really I have them), is that when watching a movie, I'll seldom turn it off until it's over. In most cases, I think the movie might somehow redeem itself before the end. I have no rational basis for this as most movies go awry in the third act. Recently, I watched The Intruder because it was eating up space on my TiVo. I'm pretty sure movies aren't supposed to be a chore to watch but this one certainly was. The director seems to think that blowing smoke and a constant jazz saxaphone in the background somehow pass for Noir. He's sorely mistaken. It's like watching a movie where the characters are listening to CD's in the background and they have to talk over them. The cast was capable but they're swimming in air. There's nothing to work with. The whole script devolves into silliness at the end. I'm not spoiling anything by telling you they have some sort of deus ex machina ending that brings us back to ...

Hube was kind enough to not only link to my site but give it a favorable review for layout and content. The layout part I agree with as I didn't create it, I simply picked it. It also wasn't my first choice. Earlier incarnations were harder to read and I was trying to do something with some flash (nb: not Flash, but flash) and decided I ought to concern myself with content over style. (I'm not entirely sure I've achieved that goal either but I digress). Initially, I was writing about matters more personal. That is, what was going on in my personal life and so on. The intent was to give the address to the far flung friends. I'm not keen on widespread blast emails that read like a family letter at Christmas. Rather, it was intended to be a day to day thing about raising kids and being the IT serf. When I started getting emails and comments from people I didn't know, I put the brakes on that one and made it more an opinion/commentary column. I still don...

I read my Alma Mater's newspaper from time to time. It's usually filled with fluff articles about student complaints and which band is going to be playing next. Occasionally, they'll talk about something substantive and per usual, they get the whole thing wrong. Female CEOs recognized -- finally Let's start with an absolute falsehood: What they say is true: when our mothers were our age, they could go to school to become a teacher, a nurse or a mother -- and that's it. The June Cleavers of the 1950s are not a myth. Women truly did vacuum the house in pearls, make pot pies every night, and iron and starch every single sock that went through the laundry. Does she really believe this? That there were only three officially sanctioned careers? She left out secretary for one and I'm fairly confident there have been female secretaries. I think there were nuns too but I could be wrong on that one. I've never heard of anyone starching socks but let's contin...

I like fine dining. I don't get a chance to go out very often so when I do, I have little compunction on spending when I do. I'd rather go out fewer times and go someplace nice than go out more often and go someplace crappy. That said, there's got to be a limit. Look at this and this and tell me these people aren't either really really loaded or completely nuts.

Reporters are usually the ones filing briefs in courts to force people to reveal things they don't want to reveal. The BBC, however, knows full well this report is going to be very damning. Conservatives have been complaining about the BBC's reporting for years. Some even go so far as to refer to them as Baghdad Broadcasting Company. This will be another strong indicator that there is little case for keeping the BBC as a public entity. If they are skewing their coverage (which is all but inevitable in the news business they should not be publicly funded. Let them sink or swim on their own merits. Either they have a viable product that people will pay for or they don't. PBS, take notice of this case.