Good Work Well Done

I don't know if the ASPCA gives out awards for the good work individuals do that contributes to the well-being of animals, but if they do they should cast a medal for Dave Schuler over at the Glittering Eye. I've seen no other site on the web that did as good a job following the pet food contamination story. If you had any question about the situation The Glittering Eye either had the answer or the link that would lead you to the answer. (See the latest update on the story here.)

Dave's good work has not gone unnoticed, especially around these parts.

How Long Has It Been Mary Celeste?

I find these sort of stories fascinating: 'Ghost Ship' Puzzles Rescuers

Australian rescuers were on Friday trying to solve the "Mary Celeste" style mystery of a yacht found floating off the coast with its engine running, food on its table ready to eat, but no crew.

The 12-meter (36 feet) catamaran was found 80 nautical miles off Townsville on the northeast coast, but there was no sign of the three crewmen who had set sail from Queensland state bound for Australia's west coast on Sunday.

"What they found was a bit strange in that everything was normal, there was just no sign of the crew," Jon Hall from emergency management in Queensland told local radio on Friday.

Hall said the yacht's sails were up but one was badly shredded. He said the engine was running, there was food on the table, a laptop was turned on, and the radio and global positioning satellite (GPS) were working.

Three life jackets and survival equipment, including an emergency beacon, were found on board, but no life rafts.

The Mary Celeste was an abandoned "ghost ship" found off the coast of Portugal in 1872. None of the Mary Celeste's crew or passengers were ever found.

The KAZ 11 was spotted adrift on the outer Great Barrier Reef on Wednesday. Rescue crews boarded the vessel on Friday but there was no sign of the three crew men, aged 56, 63 and 69.

Police said weather conditions at sea on Sunday and Monday were rough. "There was a fair sort of a wind out there but it's improved since then, so who knows what could've happened," said Police Chief Superintendent Roy Wall,.

When I was about 9 I read a book about the Bermuda Triangle, and since that time I've had an interest in "ghost ship" stories. My first thought when I read this was piracy, but why wouldn't pirates take the laptop? Then you think that maybe they thought the boat was about to sink in rough seas, but why then is there food on the table? If seas were so rough you decided to abandon ship you would think they would be rough enough to upset a place setting.

Unfortunately for the families of the missing, these type of mysteries rarely have happy endings.

The First Domino?

A little over two years ago (!) I wrote the following about the Kyoto accord:

If the rest of the world wants to commit economic suicide they are welcome to it. What you will see is that the countries who refuse to go along with Kyoto, like the U.S., China and India, will still have thriving economies while the Kyoto countries make their headlong rush for the 19th century.

Of course that won't happen. Countries will start pealing off of Kyoto one by one as the economic realities pile up one by one.

Kyoto signatory Canada looks like it will be the first to back away officially: Canada Joins Anti-Kyoto Bloc

This week's announcement by the Canadian government -- that it may join a U.S.-led coalition focused on voluntary emissions cuts -- could be part of a global shift away from Kyoto's binding targets.

In a somewhat surprising development, Canada, a long-time supporter of the Kyoto Protocol, announced that it may want to join the Asia-Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate (AP6), a six-nation coalition focusing on voluntary emission-reduction steps and technology transfers. Many environmentalists oppose AP6 out of a fear that it may undermine political support for the legally binding Kyoto treaty.

The partnership, launched in mid-2005, is an agreement among six countries -- Australia, China, India, Japan, South Korea and the United States -- to develop and share greenhouse-gasreduction technology to combat climate change. According to the AP6 Web site, the six partner countries "represent about half of the world's economy, population and energy use, and they produce about 65% of the world's coal, 48% of the world's steel, 37% of world's aluminum, and 61% of the world's cement." The countries also account for half the world's greenhouse-gas emissions.

Unlike the Kyoto Protocol, the Asia-Pacific Partnership is voluntary and technology-based, and lets each country set its own goals for greenhouse gas emission reductions, rather than legally binding them to a greenhouse gas reduction target. The group sees itself as "a voluntary, non-legally binding framework for international co-operation to facilitate the development, diffusion, deployment, and transfer of existing, emerging and longer term cost-effective, cleaner, more efficient technologies and practices."

...

It is too early to see the real significance of Canada's request to join the AP6. For the Harper government, it is simply a logical next step in the "Made In Canada" approach to climate policy. Between membership in the AP6 and their new Clean Air Act initiatives, Canada can still trumpet its strong commitment to greenhouse-gas-emission reductions, while taking a step away from the hard-target focus of Kyoto.

The key question that remains is whether Canada is a bellwether for other countries, as some Canadians like to see themselves, and is likely to lead more of the anti-Kyoto flock into the AP6 pasture. After all, if Canada, which prides itself on internationalism, "soft power," and a somewhat anti-American policy stance, can join a U.S.-sponsored rival to the Kyoto Protocol, who can't?

I find the explicit linking of Kyoto with anti-American sentiment telling. Don't you?

I'm not sure we will see countries "flocking" to the AP6 as such, but it seems likely that more and more countries will back away from the strictures of Kyoto as the economic realities become impossible to ignore. European countries have been able to ignore such realities by playing carbon "trading" games that do nothing but mask the fact they haven't met Kyoto standards and do not seem likely to do so in the foreseeable future. So, even if Canada proves to be one of the few to publicly remove itself from Kyoto, you will see may other countries leave it as a practical matter, though it may remain the "law" of the land.

Over at CQ they had a slightly different take:

Kyoto would force the West to commit economic suicide while allowing India and China to pollute to their hearts' content in reaping the rewards. Bush's AP6 engages all sides equally and uses technology sharing as an incentive for compliance. The Chinese need access to Western technology so badly that they jump through hoops to steal it. India doesn't need it as badly, but they want to create a cleaner energy system for themselves, and have expanded their nuclear program to accommodate that need.

If Canada joins the AP6, Kyoto will collapse. It will bind only those nations who already have economic difficulties, and Kyoto compliance -- which none of them have met -- will cost them even more. In the end, AP6 will bind all nations together in a manner that Kyoto explicitly rejected and will allow everyone to proceed with clean-environment initiatives on an equal footing.

This view imparts a vision of the AP6 as a framework to get actual things done which is inaccurate. For the largest part the AP6 is a publicity stunt that gives politically expedient "cover" for its members. It may facilitate on some technological issues, but pollution control policies will remain entirely in the domestic arena. Because of that, economic realities will win the day.

Kyoto is like the dodo. All it ever took was an honest look to see that it was never going to fly. And one day it will go away, never to be seen again. The only difference between the two is that after the dodo was gone the world was a poorer place.

"I'll Have 8 For The Road"

There are some hardy women out in Washington state. Woman registers a .47 on breath tester

A Woodinville woman arrested following two car crashes last week registered a .47 blood-alcohol content on a breath test — nearly six times the legal intoxication threshold and possibly a state record.

Deana F. Jarrett, 54, was taken to Evergreen Hospital as a precaution following her arrest April 11, the Washington State Patrol said Wednesday. No one was injured in the accidents.

Jarrett blew the .47 on a portable breath tester after she collided with two other vehicles in quick succession, the patrol said. A check of all 356,000 breath tests administered since 1998 in Washington turned up only 35 above .40 — and none of those was higher than .45.

The legal intoxication threshold in Washington is .08.

Jarrett did not appear to have a listed phone number, and it was not clear if she had obtained a lawyer.

If the lawyer doesn't advertise on the back of Jim Beam bottles, I'm pretty sure she hasn't found him.

This amazes me as Tony LaRussa falls asleep waiting for a traffic light while he's at .09, and this gal is out playing bumper cars with more than FOUR times the blood alcohol.

I'd say there must be something in the water out there, but I'm pretty sure she never touches the stuff.

Harry Reid's Early Onset Dementia

Over at Patterico a diagnosis has been made:

For high comedy, look no further than the esteemed Majority Leader in the United States Senate, Senator Harry Reid of Nevada.

Here was his recorded vote on S.3 — “A bill to prohibit the procedure commonly known as partial birth abortion.”

You can find Senator Reid’s vote of “Yea” listed three different ways.

Skip ahead to the Supreme Court’s decision today affirming S.3 against a facial challange to its constitutionality. As reported by CNN:

This was the first time the high court had heard a major abortion case in six years, and since then, its makeup has changed, with Roberts and Alito now on board.

Their presence on the bench provided the solid conservative majority needed to allow the federal ban to go into effect, with Kennedy providing the key fifth vote for a majority.

Alito replaced Sandra Day O’Connor, a key abortion rights supporter over her quarter century on the bench.

“A lot of us wish that Alito weren’t there and O’Connor were there,” Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nevada, who opposed Alito’s nomination, said.

Apparently Harry forgot that he voted in favor of the ban which the Court upheld.

Which raises the question of whether he makes a habit of voting for bills he deems to be unconstitutional.

Poor Harry. He can't decided which of his heartfelt convictions we wants to stand behind.

I'm guessing he'll embrace his conviction to be re-elected.

To Tag Or Not To Tag

Today that is the question. I'll admit that I sometimes wish I had when I only vaguely remember something I've written long ago and want to highlight it. I could go back and retroactively add tags to the old posts, but all that work only makes sense if tags are a feature that readers actually use.

So I'm asking you, the few, the happy few, who read this blog regularly; Do you find tags useful?

Living In Your Own Private Constitution

Welcome to the land of the banal, aka the Gonzalez v. Carhart dissent.

In reaffirming Roe, the Casey Court described the centrality
of "the decision whether to bear . . . a child," Eisenstadt
v. Baird, 405 U. S. 438, 453 (1972), to a woman's
"dignity and autonomy," her "personhood" and "destiny,"
her "conception of . . . her place in society." 505 U. S., at
851-852. Of signal importance here, the Casey Court
stated with unmistakable clarity that state regulation of
access to abortion procedures, even after viability, must
protect "the health of the woman." Id., at 846.

Reading this I began to doubt I was in actuality reading a piece of Constitutional Law. As near as I can figure it, while I was attempting to read Carhart I must have accidently turned away from my computer screen, gone downstairs and started watching Oprah.

Were we to adhere to the Ginsburg touchy-feely school of jurisprudence, where the ultimate standards are not law but any individuals sentiments concerning their "destiny" or their "conception of their place in society," is there anything that would be legitimate for Congress to legislate about?

"Gee," claims someone in California, "It is just an integral part of my personhood and my individual destiny to ingest as much crack cocaine as I can." Logically, Ginsburg would have to grant such a request. (She wouldn't of course, but only because logical consistency isn't her bag baby.)

What Ginsburg dissent comes down to is an attempt to defend an argument made in bad faith. If the meaning of the "woman's health" requirement can come down to her understanding of her personhood in relation to the cosmos, it is in effect meaningless. Indeed, it makes the Constitution not a document defining our public life as a people, but a text whose meaning is solely in the eye of the beholder.

Derrida would be proud.

I'm horrified.

Gore Wrong Again

Wow. This makes twice in two days.

By Chris Landsea: New Hurricane Science

Today a new paper by Gabe Vecchi and Brian Soden has been published:

Vecchi G. A., B. J. Soden (2007), Increased tropical Atlantic wind shear in model projections of global warming, Geophys. Res. Lett., 34, L08702, doi:10.1029/2006GL028905. (PDF)

My reading of the paper by Vecchi and Soden is that this is a very important contribution to the understanding of how global warming is affecting hurricane activity. The study thoroughly examines how the wind shear and other parameters that can alter the number and intensity of hurricanes because of manmade global warming. What they found - surprisingly - is that in the Atlantic that the wind shear should increase significantly over a large portion of where hurricanes occur - making it more difficult for hurricanes to form and grow. This was identified in all of the 18 global climate models they examined. (Perhaps it's not that surprising given that Knutson/Tuleya 2004 showed some of the same signal for the more reliable models back then. Now the signal is in ALL of the CGCMs.) Even the MPI changes in the Atlantic appear mixed, due to the smaller SST increases there (with more uniform upper trop temp changes) compared with the rest of the global tropics/subtropics.

One implication to me is that this further provides evidence that the busy period we've seen in the Atlantic hurricanes since 1995 is due to natural cycles, rather than manmade causes. We've seen a big reduction in wind shear in the last thirteen hurricane seasons, which is OPPOSITE to the signal that Vecchi and Soden have linked to manmade global warming changes. Another implication is that this paper reconfirms earlier work that suggests that global warming will cause very small changes to Atlantic hurricanes, even several decades from now.[emphasis added]

Note that the predicted result of global warming should be fewer hurricanes, not more of them. It also looks like we would expect, on average, less intense hurricanes as well. The extremely active hurricanes seasons we have been experiencing in the Atlantic basin actually argue against their being any noticeable effect on tropical storms by warming.

In one sense none of this is new, but this signal has now been identified in every single major hurricane model used today. It is safe to say that folks like Gore are using "catastrophe scenarios" that contradict the state of the science today.

Oh consensus, we hardly knew ye!

Gore is a charlatan.

UPDATE:

Let's see how folks are reacting to this study.

Kerry Emanuel, a hurricane expert at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology [whose previous work is directly contradicted by these findings-ed.] , said he thinks storms' sensitivity to wind shear may be overestimated.

Emanuel, who was not involved in this research, said he published a study last year that calculated that increasing the potential intensity of a storm via warming by 10% increases hurricane power by 65%, whereas increasing shear by 10% decreases hurricane power by only 12%. [As ALL hurricane models are accounted for in this new study, one can only assume that either A) Emanuel's work is shoddy, or B) Deliberately misleading. Based on what I've read of Emanuel's "work" I'm leaning towards "B" being more likely.]

On the other hand, Christopher W. Landsea of NOAA's National Hurricane Center, called Vecchi's study "a very important contribution to the understanding of how global warming is affecting hurricane activity."

Landsea, who was not part of the research, said he believes it "provides evidence that the busy period we've seen in the Atlantic hurricanes since 1995 is due to natural cycles, rather than manmade causes."

The research was funded by NOAA and NASA.

Actually, the complete discounting of this new study by Emanuel without even a HINT that he should investigate the matter more fully, simply confirms the lack of scientific principle at play here. Emanuel has spoken the "gospel" and he doesn't want to hear from the "unbelievers."

Disgraceful.

AGW Needs A New Poster Child

Funny thing happens when you actually do research as opposed to posturing and public relation campaigns: Kilimanjaro's ice set to linger

A fresh assessment suggests the famous ice fields on Africa's tallest mountain will be around for decades yet.

Recent concerns that climate warming would rob Mount Kilimanjaro of all its glaciers within 20 years are overly pessimistic, say Austrian scientists.

Their weather station data and modelling work indicate the tropical ice should last well beyond 2040.

Precipitation and not temperature is the key to the white peak's future, the University of Innsbruck-led team says.

"About five years ago Kilimanjaro was being used as an icon for global warming. We know now that this was far too simplistic a view," said Thomas Moelg.

In case you don't speak academic that last bit I highlighted means "Blaming this on AGW is dead wrong, but we don't really feel like losing our main sources of funding."

The research team has been using three automated instrument stations on the top of the mountain to collect continuous data on temperature, pressure, solar radiation, humidity and wind.

The recording effort was in position late last year to witness heavy snowfall, which will have led to a slight increase in Kilimanjaro's overall ice volume.

This glacier growth is only temporary, however. The mountain's ice is dependent on the pulses of moist air that sweep across from the Indian Ocean.

Since the late 1800s, these have become less frequent, and the regular snows that would maintain the ice fields are now a rare occurrence in what has become a much drier climate in East Africa.

Please remember that last year was (so we were told) the "warmest year ever" and the glacier at Kilimanjaro grew larger. Also notice that this research confirms the hypothesis that glacier retreat has nothing to do with "warming" but with moisture patterns AND that these patterns starting changing in the 19th century. (Must have been caused by those "Sport Utility Horse and Buggies.")

Some scientists have drawn a fairly straight-line curve and forecast a rapid final retreat to a totally bare mountain.

But the Innsbruck team is more optimistic about the medium term having now put real field measurements into a comprehensive modelling programme.

"Glacier recession has been a feature on Kilimanjaro for more than 100 years, but this is the first time we really have a precise understanding of the physical processes that control the glacier-climate interaction on Africa's highest mountain," said Dr Moelg.

But those other scientists made the politically correct assumption, how could they have been wrong??

This work emphasises the significance of the lack of precipitation (250mm per year on the summit) versus temperature (a mean of -7C).

It indicates that glacier mass loss would be about four times higher if precipitation decreased by 20% than if air temperature on the mountain rose by 1C.

Furthermore, it suggests that two-thirds of the ice that is lost goes straight into the atmosphere through sublimation (the direct conversion of snow and ice to water vapour).

"In recent years many people have talked about 'the melting glaciers of Kilimanjaro'. If one wants to be more precise, I would call it the 'evaporating glaciers of Kilimanjaro'," said Dr Moelg.

This confirms the view that the African peak does not play an important role as a reservoir for water, unlike in the Andes and the Himalayas where some lowland cities and agricultural systems are dependent on summer melt high in the mountains.

"This is not a factor at all at Kilimanjaro and it never has been," said Professor Kaser.

Well, that pretty much covers it. Everything, absolutely everything, said about the Kilimanjaro glaciers by Al Gore has been shown to be wrong.

He's real big on the "truth" you know.

Another One Bites The Dust

In a "Don't Lets Start" moment Tommy Thompson's bid for the Presidency effectively ends today: Making money part of Jewish tradition

Former Wisconsin governor and Republican presidential hopeful Tommy Thompson told Jewish activists Monday that making money is "part of the Jewish tradition," and something that he applauded.

Speaking to an audience at the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism in Washington D.C., Thompson said that, "I'm in the private sector and for the first time in my life I'm earning money. You know that's sort of part of the Jewish tradition and I do not find anything wrong with that."

Thompson later apologized for the comments that had caused a stir in the audience, saying that he had meant it as a compliment, and had only wanted to highlight the "accomplishments" of the Jewish religion.

"I just want to clarify something because I didn't [by] any means want to infer or imply anything about Jews and finances and things," he said.

What an imbecile. This is simply unspinnable. The best case scenario is that he's completely brain dead.

Tommy, do us all a favor right now and go home.

UPDATE:

It gets worse and better for Thompson:

According to the Democratic source, Thompson made several remarks that seemed off-kilter during his address. He reportedly boasted of being the governor of the first state to buy “Jewish bonds,” when he probably meant to say “Israel bonds,” and he referred to his friend, Marty Stein, as being a big supporter of the “Jewish Defense League,” when he probably meant to name the Anti-Defamation League. (The JDL is a notorious militant group.) Thompson also reportedly referred to Winston Churchill as being the first leader of Israel and the region.

This is the break Tommy needed. This is so rambling, incoherent and moronic that he can plausibly claim to have been high on heroin at the time.

Prayers For Those At Virginia Tech

Nothing to say here. I just feel gutted.

Gunman Kills 21 at Virginia Tech

The Unexamined Life Of Academics

If you haven't read Michael Barone's latest it worth a quick trip to RCP: Of Victims and Virtues

"We believe these three individuals are innocent."

The words, soberly spoken by North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper, bring to an end the unjust prosecution of the three former Duke lacrosse players.

"We have no credible evidence that an attack occurred."

The motives of the "overreaching" prosecutor, as Cooper called him, are obvious: Prosecuting three white men on charges brought by a black accuser helped him win black votes he needed in an election. The motives of those who rushed to believe the charges -- and continued to believe them 366 days after DNA testing implicated none of the players -- are something else.

The "Group of 88" Duke professors, journalists for The New York Times and the Durham Herald-Sun, and heads of black and feminist organizations all seemed to have a powerful emotional need to believe. A need to believe that those they classify as victims must be virtuous and those they classify as oppressors must be villains. A need to believe that this is the way the world usually works.

Except it doesn't. Cases that fit this template don't come along very often. In this country, black-on-white crime is far more common than white-on-black crime (black-on-black crime is far more common still). You won't see the characters exercised by the Duke case looking at the recent case of three University of Minnesota players accused (whether justly or not) of rape -- they happen to be black.

This need to believe that the victim class is always virtuous and the oppressor class is guilty is widespread, and perhaps growing, in this country and abroad. It is particularly strong among those lucky enough to get paid to observe the way most people work and live -- academics, journalists, apparatchiks of advocacy organizations.

Truly the most scandalous aspect of the entire Duke case is not the behavior of prosecutor Nifong. His unethical grandstanding was despicable but in many ways par-for-the-course in the world of electoral politics. Had the Duke players actually been guilty of the rape nobody would have held Nifong's behavior against him even though his behavior would have been no less unethical.

No, the truly scandalous behavior belongs to the academics both at Duke and around the country who have shown such contempt for both their students and the basic principles of due process and common decency. Barone seems a little surprised that so many of these well educated folks continued to believe in the guilt of the lacrosse players despite all evidence to the contrary. If you think of it as the result of their warped political ideology the mystery falls away from it. Indeed, from their perspective none of this has anything to do with the actual guilt or innocence of these three individuals. Ideological purity demanded that they be guilty regardless of the facts because they were white and privileged and the accuser wasn't. To them actual evidence is an impediment to the "larger truth" they wish to impose. (Yes, for these folks "truth" is something imposed not discovered.) If a few innocent people have to have their lives destroyed in the name of their ideological vision SO BE IT!!! "All for the greater common good!!"

The "Group of 88" represent an almost perfect storm of intellectual vacuity combined with moral degradation. College students deserve better. Based upon the non-reaction of the academics to the fact they were disastrously wrong in this case, I think it is safe to say college students will wind up getting worse.

Pushing Back There, Capitulating Here

Two stories on a single subject. First from Pakistan: Karachi protest at Sharia mosque

Tens of thousands of people have protested in the Pakistani city of Karachi against a radical mosque and its religious schools in Islamabad.

The chief cleric of the Lal Masjid (Red Mosque), Abdul Aziz, had announced a Taleban-style Islamic court would be set up to curb "vulgar" activities.

He also gave the government a month to close video shops and brothels.

The protest organisers, the Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM), branded the mosque "religious terrorists".

The MQM is largely supportive of the policies of President Pervez Musharraf.

MQM leader Altaf Hussain told Sunday's rally by telephone from London via loudspeakers: "Islam is a religion of peace and there is no place in it for using force or terrorism.

"The people of Islamabad are insecure and under threat due to the activities of these religious terrorists."

Abdul Aziz is a vocal critic of the Pakistan government's support for the US-led "war on terrorism".

Last week he announced a court based on Islamic Sharia law and began an anti-vice campaign.

The court passed a fatwa on Tourism Minister Nilofar Bakhtiar after she was pictured hugging a man following a paragliding flight.

It is nice to see so many good folks in Pakistan resisting this "bridge to the 11th century." It is a little sad that even the BBC feels the need to portray the choice involved as being "religion or brothels." At least the protesters get it, even if the BBC is a little fuzzy on the subject.

Whenwhile in Minnesota the Balkanization of the US continues: Ritual-washing area for Muslims at MCTC may be only the beginning

Last week, I wrote about Minneapolis Community and Technical College, which is planning to install facilities to help Muslim students perform ritual washing before daily prayers. It's a simple matter of extending "hospitality" to newcomers, says President Phil Davis -- no different than providing a fish option in the college cafeteria for Christian students during Lent.
MCTC is apparently the first public institution in Minnesota to enter this unfamiliar territory. Where is it looking for guidance?

Dianna Cusick, MCTC's director of legal affairs, is overseeing the project. She referred me to the Muslim Accommodations Task Force, whose website she is using as a primary resource (www.startribune.com/2617). "They've done all the research," she said.

On the site, I found information about the handful of public colleges that have "wudu," or ritual bathing, facilities.

But I also discovered something more important for colleges seeking guidance on "accommodations": Projects like MCTC's are likely to be the first step in a long process.

...

At Georgetown University, Muslim women can live apart in housing that enables them to "sleep in an Islamic setting," as the website puts it. According to a student at the time the policy was adopted, the university housing office initially opposed the idea, on grounds that all freshman should have the experience of "living in dorms and dealing with different kinds of people." That might sound appealing, Muslim students told a reporter in an article featured on the website. But in their view, the reporter wrote, "learning to live with 'different kinds of people' " actually "causes more harm than good" for Muslims, because it requires them to live in an environment that "distracts them from their desire to become better Muslims, and even draw[s] weaker Muslims away from Islam."

The task force isn't operated by overly enthusiastic college students. Its professional staff, based in the Washington, D.C., area, includes coordinators who provide legal advice, teach students to lobby, write letters on their behalf, and help them overcome "obstacles" such as college administrators' concerns about violating the separation of church and state.

The Muslim Accommodations Task Force is a project of the Muslim Student Association of the U.S. and Canada. MSA's mission is to enable Muslims here "to practice Islam as a complete way of life," and its "main goal" is "spreading Islam," according to its website. The association calls itself the "landmark Muslim organization in North America," and says it has chapters on 600 campuses.

On MSA's website (www.msa-national.org), the sort of inclusive language used by the Muslim Accommodations Task Force gives way to hard-hitting advice for insiders. One downloadable publication --"Your Chapter's Guide to Campus Activism" -- describes how activists can advance political positions such as "restoring justice within the Palestinian territories," and opposition to the Patriot Act and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The cover features a student with a megaphone, and the slogan "Speak Out! Stand Up! Say It Loud!"

MSA views itself as America's moral and political vanguard. "As Muslims, we are a nation elected by God to lead humanity,"

Isn't this exactly the sort of statement that would get liberals everywhere hopping mad if Pat Robertson said it?

Just wondering.

Over at CQ they ahd the following to say about this:

These Muslim activists want to create a separate society within the United States for Muslims, and they want the US to provide them the facilities with which to create it. Separate dorms, separate cafeterias, Muslim-only physical-education classes -- they want a separate Muslim college at MCTC and everywhere else. It's self-initiated apartheid.

Forty years ago and more, we had segregationists insisting that different peoples could not live within the same area without dividing lines. They used the same excuses as multiculturalists do today, too; each culture feels more secure when they can exclude others. We heard it from white supremacists and from black separatists -- and we proved them wrong. We made sure that people knew America stood for peaceful integration and not for Balkanization, even for what seemed to be good reasons to some.

Now we have Muslims who want to reopen the argument in order to create a closed society for themselves within the US. We have no problem with Muslims who integrate into our society and become Americans in deed as well as in name. If Muslims want to open their own universities to ensure the proper exercise of their religion, well, that works too. But if Muslims want us to recreate the French banlieus and an homage to Jim Crow so they can get even more insular than they already are here in the US, then we need to put our foot down -- washed or unwashed -- and say, "Enough!"

We do not need religious apartheid at MCTC or any other public university or facility. If devout Muslims do not want to integrate into American society, then they need to find another place to live. Period.

This is exactly right. The situation we have here is not the same as the efforts of previous immigrant groups to hold on to some aspects of their ethnic heritage through social clubs or "old world" language newspapers and the like. Here you have groups bent upon the eventual destruction of the liberties we all enjoy as Americans because it is inherently "harmful to Islam" to their mind. This is intolerable in the United States. Now, if they wanted to segregate themselves out of mainstream society, such as folks like the Amish do, that is one thing, but to demand that they should be allowed to create a separate United States is not acceptable.

If that is what they want they need to find somewhere else to live.

It is sad to see so many in higher education willing to sell out the principles of this nation at the drop of a hat.

My Own Personal "Amen" Corner

Saw this at Winds of Change:

Media Matters has a post up today explaining that

Internet gossip Matt Drudge has claimed that Media Matters for America is a "Soros operation."

In fact, Media Matters has never received funding from progressive philanthropist George Soros.

Looking at the non-authoritative but informative Sourcewatch entry on Media Matters we get:

Funded with "more than $2 million in donations from wealthy liberals." "Among Mr. Brock's donors is Leo Hindery, Jr., the former cable magnate; Susie Tompkins Buell, who is co-founder of the fashion company Esprit and is close to Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York, and Ms. Buell's husband Mark; and James C. Hormel, a San Francisco philanthropist whose appointment as ambassador to Luxembourg was delayed for a year and a half in the late 1990's by conservative lawmakers protesting what they called his promotion of a 'gay lifestyle.'

Media Matters for America is funded in part by the Democracy Alliance.

And following the Sourcewatch link to 'Democracy Alliance' we get:

"Members of the Democracy Alliance include billionaires like George Soros and his son Jonathan Soros, former Rockefeller Family Fund president Anne Bartley, San Francisco Bay Area donors Susie Tompkins Buell and Mark Buell, Hollywood director Rob Reiner, Taco Bell heir Rob McKay ... as well as New York financiers like Steven Gluckstern."

Conservative site 'Discover the Networks' says:

Media Matters has not always been forthcoming about its high-profile backers. In particular, the group has long labored to obscure any financial ties to George Soros. But in March 2003, the Cybercast News Service (CNS) detailed the copious links between Media Matters and several Soros "affiliates" - among them MoveOn.org, the Center for American Progress, and Peter Lewis. Confronted with this story, a spokesman for the organization explained that "Media Matters for America has never received funding directly from George Soros" (emphasis added), a transparent evasion.

Here's why this matters - if the issue is to replace one group of powerhungry liars with another, it's really hard for me to motivate any energy to become involved. And I assume that I'm not alone.

Transparency and honesty matter, or they don't. You can't bust GWB for failing to be completely transparent and then cloak yourself in bullshit without the room starting to stink.

Honesty is more important to me than social justice because I don't believe that people who are profoundly dishonest are capable of advancing the cause of social justice.

What An Ass

Everything we have come to love from the "Reverend" Al Shapton.

Anti-Semitism is the cancer of the left. Anybody over there sensible enough to cut it out?