Actions tomorrow will speak louder than words today, but something interesting came out of the mouth of a UN representative — namely, the admission that the UN is focusing a disproportionate amount of its attention on condemning Israel. You don’t believe me? It’s true:

The UN Human Rights Council has failed to handle the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in a balanced fashion, the council’s chair Doru Costea said in an interview published Saturday.

Costea suggested in the interview with the daily Le Temps that the council was concentrating too much on human rights abuses by Israel, adding that he was dissatisfied.

“On this point, the council has failed,” he said, days after US President George W. Bush attacked the body for perceived anti-Israeli bias.

“The council must remain simple, and concentrate on the human rights dimension, but it must look at the stance of all sides, not only one country.”

Costea said that the majority of the 47 seats held by Asian and African countries on the council “gives a certain power, but that does not mean that this power is always used wisely.”

It’s entirely possible that President Bush had something to do with this, since it was he who said:

This body has been silent on repression by regimes from Havana to Caracas to Pyongyang and Tehran while focusing its criticism excessively on Israel.

Hear! Hear! And maybe, just maybe, someone in the UN heard! heard!

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The date of publication of Atlas Shrugged is the twelfth of October. October 12, 1957…fifty years ago. Here’s where I found out about that…

Even though many reviewers weren’t impressed with “Atlas Shrugged,” it still left a major mark. Ayn Rand inspired many, many people; most of them highschool or college students when they first read it. Although it’s not a literary masterwork, it still sells some 150,000 copies each year. People’s lives continue to be changed by it. And for that, Rand should be respected.

Damn straight. And it’s a sad, tragic thing that it has become more and more relevant to our lives with every passing day.

You know about the world of Atlas Shrugged? It takes place in a dystopian future in an unspecified year, in a sort of alternate universe wherein the world is caught up in an industrial revolution, but one in which air freight was never possible and never implemented. In this world, the entire world has gone drunk on socialism, and America remains the sole hold-out…descending threateningly into the molten scrap heap that has already engulfed all the other countries.

I’ll quote one paragraph. Just one. If this doesn’t raise some eerie similarities with the reality plane you get to hear about each evening when you click on the news, each morning when you read the paper…well, you should probably move on to the next subject. But give it a read first:

We’re all one big family, they told us, we’re all in this together. But you don’t all stand working an acetylene torch ten hours a day - together, and you don’t all get a bellyache - together. What’s whose ability and which of whose needs come first? When it’s all in one pot, you can’t let any man decide what his own needs are, can you? If you did, he might claim that he needs a yacht - and if his feelings is all you have to go by, he might prove it, too. Why not? If it’s not right for me to own a car until I’ve worked myself into a hospital ward, earning a car for every loafer and every naked savage on earth - why can’t he demand a yacht from me, too, if I still have the ability and have not collapsed? No? He can’t? Then why can he demand that I go without cream for my coffee until he’s replastered his living room?…Oh well…Well, anyway, it was decided that nobody had the right to judge his own need or ability. We *voted* on it. Yes ma’am, we voted on it in a public meeting twice a year. How else could it be done? Do you care to think what would happen at such a meeting? It took us just one meeting to discover that we had become beggars - rotten, whining, sniveling beggars, all of us, because no man could claim his pay as his rightful earning, he had no rights and no earnings, his work didn’t belong to him, it belonged to ‘the family,’ and they owed him nothing in return, and the only claim he had on them was his ‘need’ - so he had to beg in public for relief from his needs, like any lousy moocher, listing all his troubles and miseries, down to his patched drawers and his wife’s head colds, hoping that ‘the family’ would throw him the alms. He had to claim miseries, because its miseries, not work, that had become the coin of the realm - so it turned into a contest among six thousand panhandlers, each claiming that *his* need was worse than his brother’s. How else could it be done? Do you care to guess what happened, what sort of men kept quiet, feeling shame, and what sort got away with the jackpot?

See anything familiar?

If you think you do, or if you think you might…it’s six bucks.

Timeless. I wish it were not.

[Discuss This Topic With Morgan Freeberg at House of Erastothenes]

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Yesterday I blogged about the fact that, in Israel, the military solution is working against the Intifadah. Today, Roy Robison points out that the same is true in the war against Al Qaeda. (He also notes that there is no truth to the anti-War charge that the Bush Administration is so busy in Iraq that its ignored Al Qaeda in Afghanistan.) After describing the trap that is closing on Al Qaeda in the Tora Bora area, and the successful military tactics used to set and trigger this trap, Robison articulates the same conclusion the Israelis have discovered — against terrorists, who use the tools of war against us, it works to respond with bigger and better tools of war:

Despite liberals’ claims that al Qaeda terror cells are a bogey-man of the Bush Administration used to scare people to vote Republican, we can now see a direct case in which a terror cell was activated for a specific purpose: to save their jihadist buddies dying at Tora Bora.

The claim that fighting a terrorist is “giving them what they want” is one of the greatest fallacies of our time. When they attack us, it is for a specific purpose. When we do the exact opposite of what they want, they lose. They want us to disengage in the places they want to control, and then go home. Fighting them militarily, politically, economically, and diplomatically is the only way to defeat them. Giving in to them only makes them stronger.

On the playground, his conclusion would get a “Duh,” response because it’s obviously the way to treat aggressors. In the real world of post-Colonial, post-Communist, multi-culti geopolitics, it’s no so obvious, and it’s great how clearly Robison has laid it out.

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This article is cross posted at Newsbusters

There was a time when professional journalists were driven toward their profession out of a desire to protect the interests of the public through thoughtful and informative information gathering and reporting. It was an honorable job in a profession that was kept on course by a civic responsibility and a "journalistic code of ethics". This concept has been around for so long that you will often hear the phrase repeated in schools and newspapers.

The Associated Press managing editors even went to the trouble of publishing a laughable statement of Ethical Principles that lists responsibility, integrity and independence as their guiding standards.

The good newspaper is fair, accurate, honest, responsible, independent and decent. Truth is its guiding principle.

It avoids practices that would conflict with the ability to report and present news in a fair, accurate and unbiased manner.

No single case of reporting undermines that code of ethics more blatantly than the institutional bias surrounding the case of 6 black teenagers who are on trial for the beating of a white teen. Yes, I know the incident has been given the catchy moniker of “Jena 6” by race hustlers and political opportunists but I refuse to play that game. Why not call it the "Jena 7" or the even "Jena 1" in an effort to remember the one person that was violently assaulted in this case? The mainstream media has been feeding into this frenzy out of laziness, bias and lack of adherence to professional standards for some months now.

A simple side note in the case is that 6 black teens jumped and beat a white teen into bloody unconsciousness during a gang land style kick fest on school grounds. An allegedly premeditated act that should be considered the focus of most reports has now fallen by the wayside in preference to the illogical and misleading ramblings of those who are using the incident to fan the flames of racial unrest.

Yesterday the AP piled on in that tradition by giving an often described hate group called the "New Black Panther Party for Self Defense" (NBPP) a platform to spread more lies in the case.

A group called the New Black Panther Party for Self Defense now says it is organizing patrols in Jena to protect the "Jena Six" and their families from white supremacists who have threatened them.

The New Black Panthers site claims Jena police and the LaSalle Parish Sheriff’s Office had announced they would not protect the six teenagers. Sheriff Carl Smith disputed that Wednesday, saying he had put extra officers on duty and was getting help from federal officers and Louisiana State Police.

Quite frankly this is a load of crap. The police and feds are working overtime to protect all sides in this case, most recently responding to disgusting white supremacist hate groups that have reportedly published the names and addresses of the 6 defendants. Yet there is little coverage of the fact that the NBPP is now patrolling the town as some sort of uniformed vigilante police squad. I would consider that just as threatening if not more dangerous than a web site posted by some sick white supremacist person or group. The AP, obviously not one to worry too much about reporting the truth, should be held accountable if the NBPP succeeds in beating down the "white crackers" in some sort of half baked vigilante invasion.

The NBPP is an offshoot of the Nation of Islam that sees revolution as the one way to further their cause. For those readers that aren’t convinced that this means hate filled violence you need look no further than the liberal Southern Poverty Law Center who consider the New Black Panther Party to be a racist hate filled group.

According to sources listed in Wikipedia members of the NBPP have referred to Jews as "bloodsucking Jews" while advocating the killing of white "crackers"

The NBPP is considered by the Southern Poverty Law Center to be a black racist hate group, and even many of the mildest critics of the organization seem to believe that, at the very least, the NBPP’s provocative brand of black nationalism undermines other civil rights efforts. Members have referred to "bloodsucking Jews", and Khalid Abdul Muhammad "has blamed slavery and even the Holocaust on the ‘hooked-nose, bagel-eating, lox-eating, perpetrating-a-fraud, so-called Jew’." [5], [6], [7] The Southern Poverty Law Center is also an intense NBPP critic, as NBPP members have stated sympathy or understanding of Kamau Kambon’s advocacy of the racial genocide of whites on Hannity & Colmes, and Khalid Abdul Muhammad has stated that "there are no good crackers, and if you find one, kill him before he changes." [8], [9], [10]

Yet for some reason the AP has no problem giving this group a platform to spread their racist version of events.

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Obama is and, to date, always has been a small timer. Although he’s aiming for the highest office in the land, which is pretty much the highest office in the world, his practical experience is minimal, and it keeps on showing. His latest move, to support the DREAM act which will encourage in-state tuition fees for illegal immigrants is getting shrieks of outrage — from his own base. Thus, Jill Chapin, a self-described Obama supporter, has this to say:

This bill resonates with your base in a way that will ensure your losing the nomination. It smacks of unfairness, of people at the end of the line getting to move up to the front. It appeases the non-citizens while enraging registered voters. It makes us question your priorities. In a perfect world, all children would have access to a first-class education. But the United States simply cannot educate the world.

So your first allegiance should be to poor, disadvantaged American citizens who would salivate at the chance of attending an out of state school at in-state tuition rates. If there are resources left over to then help legal immigrants, then it is reasonable and right to help as many of them as we can.

Life is not fair, Senator Obama. Our schools are failing our own kids; until their needs are addressed, you are not in a position to use your influence to fund the world’s education. And you should not be rearranging truths to suit your agenda. Changing the language of our immigration laws simply to allow those of illegal status to be reclassified as legal, with all the benefits that change implies, is an insult not only to Americans but to legal immigrants. They have all played by the rules and are now shoved aside as others move in front of them. Your message seems to be that our laws are pliable, subject to what is politically expedient at the time.

Your biggest supporters such as I fear that we were so desperate to find a new kind of candidate that our gullibility in believing in you has been exposed.

***

If you hope to win the nomination for President of the United States, then you shouldn’t be campaigning for President of North America.

Ms. Chapin’s analyses, both of the DREAM Act and of Obama, are completely correct.

[Discuss this article with Bookworm over at Bookworm Room...]

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One method that spammers use to cull e-mail addresses from websites is by programatically parsing your web pages looking for e-mail addresses withing your posts and site code. It’s a form of screen scraping that is pretty simple from a conceptual point of view. Basically these bots read your site looking for e-mail addresses, sending them back to whoever is collecting them.

As simple as this process is it’s relatively easy to to circumvent these automated collectors without resorting to the annoying emailme-AT-someaddress.com lookup method. It’s called munging in technical slang. Basically munging is simply computer speak for encoding. Wordpress can actually do this for you automatically with special php calls but that isn’t as easy as the methods at http://www.addressmunger.com/.

At address munger you can enter in your e-mail address and it will generate code that is designed to hide the address in your HTML code while displaying it in human readable form on your website. I personally prefer the simple ascii munge because it is the easiest to insert on your site without fancy javascript or images, but to each his own. Give it a try and insert the code into your sidebars or a post. Just make sure you insert it as html code and not rich text.

This method isn’t perfect. Sophisticated bots can search for this special text but there are many ways to generate special code. Javascript methods and images work as well. This is just one tool in the arsenal of weapons you can use to circumvent spammers.

Give it a spin for yourself. There is an option to preview what the links will look like when inserted on your site. You can view the results for yourself and see this in action by searching for editor@webloggin.com in the source of this page.

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Bookworm pointed out the latest article by Ann Coulter on the liberal blather about free speech as it pertains to academia and Columbia University’s episodes with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Contrary to all the blather about “free speech” surrounding Ahmadinejad’s appearance at Columbia, universities in America do not invite speakers who do not perfectly mirror the political views of their America-hating faculties. Rather, they aggressively censor differing viewpoints and permit only a narrow category of speech on their campuses. Ask Larry Summers.

If a university invites someone to speak, you know the faculty agrees with the speaker. Maybe not the entire faculty. Some Columbia professors probably consider Ahmadinejad too moderate on Israel.

Columbia president Lee Bollinger claimed the Ahmadinejad invitation is in keeping with “Columbia’s long-standing tradition of serving as a major forum for robust debate.”

Except Columbia doesn’t have that tradition. This is worse than saying “the dog ate my homework.” It’s like saying “the dog ate my homework” when you’re Michael Vick and everyone knows you’ve killed your dog.

Columbia’s “tradition” is to shut down any speakers who fall outside the teeny, tiny seditious perspective of its professors. - Ann Coulter, Tase Him Bro!

This is why liberals hate Ann Coulter. She exposes their hypocrisy with ease, thus making them uncomfortable at having been outed. Democrats invent controversy and she points it out, plain and simple.

At Syracuse University last year, when liberal hecklers tried to shut down a speech by a popular conservative author of (almost!) six books, College Republicans began to remove the hecklers. But Dean of Students Roy Baker blocked them from removing students disrupting the speech on the grounds that removing students screaming during a speech would violate the hecklers’ “free speech.” They had a “free speech” right to prevent anyone from hearing a conservative’s free speech.

That’s what colleges mean by “free speech.” (And by the way, my fingers are getting exhausted from making air quotes every time I use the expression “free speech” in relation to a college campus.)

“Tolerance of opposing views” means we have to listen to their anti-American views, but they don’t have to hear our pro-American views. (In Washington, they call this “the Fairness Doctrine.”)

Give Coulter credit. She is usually spot on with her insights and has a knack for getting under the skin of people who don’t like the way she exercises her right to freedom of speech. Thus modern day liberalism takes another blow as Americans speak truth to power and expose the hypocrisy that is inherent in the rank and file of the Democrat Party base.

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I am not conversant with the details of the Patriot Act, nor am I a Constitutional lawyer. I simply find it interesting that, more often than not, when a Federal District Court judge rules something about the Patriot Act unlawful, that judge is a Clinton appointee. The most recent case in point is a decision out of Portland, Oregon, where Ann Aiken, a Clinton appointee, struck down part of the act:

Two provisions of the USA Patriot Act are unconstitutional because they allow search warrants to be issued without a showing of probable cause, a federal judge ruled Wednesday.

U.S. District Judge Ann Aiken ruled that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, as amended by the Patriot Act, “now permits the executive branch of government to conduct surveillance and searches of American citizens without satisfying the probable cause requirements of the Fourth Amendment.”

Portland attorney Brandon Mayfield sought the ruling in a lawsuit against the federal government after he was mistakenly linked by the FBI to the Madrid train bombings that killed 191 people in 2004.

The federal government apologized and settled part of the lawsuit for $2 million after admitting a fingerprint was misread. But as part of the settlement, Mayfield retained the right to challenge parts of the Patriot Act.

Mayfield claimed that secret searches of his house and office under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act violated the Fourth Amendment’s guarantee against unreasonable search and seizure. Aiken agreed with Mayfield, repeatedly criticizing the government.

“For over 200 years, this Nation has adhered to the rule of law — with unparalleled success. A shift to a Nation based on extra-constitutional authority is prohibited, as well as ill-advised,” she wrote.

Aiken’s ruling may be absolutely correct. I’m not quarreling with the ruling. I’m just noticing a pattern. (See here for another recent example in that same pattern.)

[Discuss the article with Bookworm over at Bookworm Room...]

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Last month, when a Colorado school issued an edict banning tag because someone might get emotionally hurt, I did a long post about how I thought the long-term consequences of that decision were infinitely worse than the short term issue of kids having a playground conflict. In the last couple of paragraphs of that same post, I wrote about a decision in my daughter’s classroom to ban a favorite type of boy play: imaginary weapons. I would have been okay had the rules denied any wild play in the classroom, reserving it instead for the school yard. What bugged me was how targeted it was to boys’ activities.

I’m not the only one who has noticed this trend. At American Thinker, Selwyn Duke has written a wonderful piece about these same education trends, with special emphasis on the attacks against the nature of boys. I urge you to read it and then, if you still have boys in public school, think about ways politely to change the dynamic.

Incidentally, it’s worth noting that elementary school education in the latter half of the 20th Century became pretty much the preserve of women, so one has to accept that there inevitably was going to be feminization in the classroom. This early feminine touch, though was aimed at soothing rough edges, teaching manners, and generally civilizing wild behavior. Nowadays, there’s a misanthropic, feminist edge to what’s going on, that is very much aimed, not at teaching manners, but at “de-boying” boys (witness the fact that, in my daughter’s class, a specific type of boy play got banned).

[Discuss This Topic With Bookworm at Bookworm Room]

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I see that readers from Memeorandum are finding their way here thanks to a linkup. Welcome! Please relax, enjoy yourselves, look around and drop us a line with suggestions (be nice :)

Update: Finkelstein is on the case! Shuster apologizes in an uncharacteristic on air break in during Tucker. The tone of the apology is much different than an earlier Shuster response that was obtained by National Review in a Shuster e-mail to where he essentially said that it didn’t matter where the soldier lived; i.e. Shuster believes his point is more important than the facts and overlooks the shameless use of a killed soldier as a prop. Read the full story on Newsbusters.

the story was about blackburn’s hypocrisy… it wouldn’t matter whether the soldier’s name was David shuster or Crazy Water. she didn’t know the name, period.
Regards,
D

Representative Blackburn responded to the incident on John Gibson’s show as captured here.

Original Story Below:

Mark Finkelstein at Newsbusters detailed the sick and tasteless gotcha game that Tucker Carlson sit in host David Shuster tried to play on Rep. Marsha Blackburn, (R-Tenn.) when he tried to trip her up by asking her to name the latest person in her district to be killed in Iraq.

The segment, called of all things, “GOP Hypocrisy?“, was somehow supposed to show that Republican outrage against the MoveOn.org “Betrayus” ad was contrived and hypocritical by catching the representative unable to answer the question. Instead the segment proved that David Shuster is a shill for the Democratic party who is too hypocritical himself to do the first hand work necessary to verify his facts; which of course turn out to be false in another case of a blogger catching a mainstream media reporter with his facts where the sun doesn’t shine.

SHUSTER: Congressman, let‘s talk about the public trust. You represent, of course, a district in western Tennessee. What was the name of the last soldier from your district who was killed in Iraq?

BLACKBURN: The name of the last soldier killed in Iraq, from my district, I do not know.

SHUSTER: His name was Jeremy Bohannan (ph). He was killed August 9, 2007. How come you did not know that the name?

BLACKBURN: I do not know why I did not know the name. We made contact with the families in our district. When you have a major military post, you are very sensitive to this and sensitive to working with those families, and that is something that my staff and I do daily. Our district director is a gentleman who has served in the U.S. Army and currently serves in the National Guard. And we do everything that we possibly can do to assist those families. We are very appreciative of the sacrifice.

SHUSTER: But you were not appreciative enough to know the name of this young man. He was 18 years old and killed. Yet you can say chapter and verse about what‘s going on with the “New York Times” and MoveOn.org.

BLACKBURN: You‘re exactly right. I can say chapter and verse what was going on with MoveOn.org.

SHUSTER: Don‘t you understand the problems that a lot of people would have, that you‘re so focused on an ad. When was the last time a “New York Times” ad ever killed somebody? Yet here we have a war that took the life of an 18-year-old kid, Jeremy Bohannan, from your district and you didn’t know his name?

Pretty harsh words for a person who didn’t bother to check the facts himself. But what are we to expect from a reporter who appears daily on “Hardball with Chris Matthews”?

After doing some research however it turns out that Pvt. Jeremy Bohannon didn’t live in Blackburn’s district after all. Attentive blogger Conservative Belle did a follow up and found out that in fact the slain soldier is represented by Democrat Congressman John Tanner. A fact that has been confirmed by Newsbusters.

Worse however is that the media has no problem using the tragic death of a soldier for their own political games. Democrats want to bring the soldiers back home but I wonder how many of them would be able to play in Shuster’s cat and mouse game.

MSNBC still has the video up here. Shuster has yet to comment.

My wife thinks I shouldn’t do any name calling so I will defer to her better sensibilities and avoid terms like moronic and stupid when describing this latest stunt. Let’s just call it “typical” for the cagey guys over at MSNBC.

See also: Hot Air

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