Israel warns: free soldier or PM dies

Israel last night threatened to assassinate Palestinian Prime Minister Ismael Haniyeh if Hamas militants did not release a captured Israeli soldier unharmed.

The unprecedented warning was delivered to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in a letter as Israel debated a deal offered by Hamas to free Corporal Gilad Shalit. It came as Israeli military officials readied a second invasion force for a huge offensive into Gaza.

The plot thickens. Stay tuned!

U.S. Law Trumps World Treaty, High Court Says

This SCOTUS decision is, IMHO a good one:

Stating that American law outweighs an international treaty, the Supreme Court said Wednesday that foreign criminals held in state prisons did not have a right to reopen their cases if their rights under the Vienna Convention had been violated.

Any time the Court gives primacy of American law over treaty law (or for that matter foreign law), it’s a good thing, and not to be taken for granted given some recent citation of foreign law in SCOTUS decisions.

Court rebukes Bush on war crimes trials

SCOTUS has spoken – no military tribunals.

The Terrs are still in custody, and there they remain, legally, and apparently for the duration.

Aggravating, but not a huge disaster. It is still worth noting that the usual suspects on SCOTUS were opposed to anything smacking of a vigorous defense of the Republic.

In the future, one can hope that Roberts will be able to make a difference, which he could not on this decision due to his prior involvement in the case at the appellate level.

Our World: Israel’s Rude Awakening

It is painful to watch Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, Defense Minister Amir Peretz and Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni try to contend with the terrible outcome of the Palestinian terror strike against the IDF on Sunday morning. They use so many fancy and angry words. They sound so resolute. And yet, they have nothing useful to say. Two soldiers are dead, a third is now the prisoner of jihadist killers, seven are wounded, an IDF border post has been overrun, and a world view and a security doctrine have been blown to smithereens.

Wow! The Chief is impressed! This gal has a gift for cutting to the chase and calling an ugly spade an ugly spade! But wait! To summarize:

That world view involves a denial of a basic, fundamental truth: When you empower terrorists, terrorists are empowered.

You, with the Chief might say – DUH! Many politicians (to say nothing of judges and journalists), in the US, Eurabia, as well as Israel have yet to grasp this fundamental truth.

This piece goes on with more detail on the current (pre-military action) situation in Gaza. Nothing that’s happened so far changes it’s validity as far as the Chief can tell. Check it out!

Ancient Seal Remains Reveal Warmer Antarctica, Study Says

The Chief is agnostic at this point on so-called Global Warming. It may well be occurring. That being said, it is NOT due to human activity. The sun is the driver for global climate – MUCH more than anything we could even TRY to do in this area. Here’s some more evidence of this:

In an Antarctic “ghost town,” freeze-dried whiskers, skin, and bones provide evidence that the South Pole was a much warmer place not too long ago, a new study reveals.

The 1,000- to 6,000-year-old elephant seal remains were found in abandoned breeding colonies in a now barren region of Victoria Land on the Antarctic coast near the Ross Sea (map of Antarctica). The discovery, scientists say, is the first hard evidence for a warming period in the region between 2,300 and 1,100 years ago.

Without industrialized civilization back in 200 BC, there’s not much WE could have done to stimulate this period of warming, which DOES correspond at least generally to a previously known northern hemisphere medieval warming period.

Once again – can you say S-U-N?

Eurabia is the Dhimmified side of Europe, whose fear of Islamophobia is often nothing short of insane. Just a random selection of items here that speak for themselves:

‘Honour killing’ family jailed over shot bride

Six members of a family of Pakistani origin were jailed in Denmark yesterday for their part in the murder of an 18-year-old girl whose “honour killing” shocked the country.

Ghazala Khan was shot dead by her elder brother two days after she married her Afghan husband, Emal. Her husband, who was shot in the stomach, survived, and now lives under police protection.

Ghazala’s father, Ghulum Abbas, 57, who emigrated from Punjab in 1970, had reacted furiously to his daughter’s choice of husband and ordered his son, Akthar Abbas, and other members of the family to track down the couple and kill them.

Belgian police find bodies of missing girls by railway tracks

Two stepsisters missing for 18 days after a street party in the Belgian city of Liège were found murdered in a storm drain yesterday.

A convicted child rapist, Abdallah Ait Oud, was in the bar, Les Armuriers, at the time of their disappearance, and is being held under preventive custody as the sole suspect. He denies involvement in the case, saying he was incapacitated by alcohol and cocaine at the time.

Despite the arrest of Ait Oud, 38, who is of Moroccan descent, locals said they still feared for the safety of their children, expressing disbelief that one man acting alone could abduct two girls in the middle of a crowded street.

G-had and suicide bombers: the rapper who likens Bin Laden to Che Guevara

Two record company executives are threatening to resign from a label over an album by a radical Muslim musician which has tracks about the immorality of the west, suicide bombers and Osama bin Laden. Aki Nawaz is determined to release what is, by anyone’s standards, a phenomenally angry album.

The album, All is War (The Benefits of G-had), contains one track which uses the words of Bin Laden issuing “a statement of reason and explanation of impending conflict” and equates him with Che Guevara. Another forensically recreates a suicide bomber at work. The opening song is a rejection of what Nawaz sees as the hypocrisy and immorality of the west. One supposedly dream-like track predicts the demise of America at the hands of Islam.

Nawaz, a former drummer in the Southern Death Cult, said yesterday: “I have a right to push the boundaries as much as anyone else has…

Ain’t it great over there?

Defense Dept. imposes loyalty test on American Jews

The Chief can’t help but recall the Fwench frame-up of Capt. Alfred Dreyfus, the highest-ranking Jewish officer in their so-called army. The fight and eventual proof of his innocence had extensive literary and political ramifications that lasted far beyond l’affair itself.

The Pentagon has banned security clearance to Americans with relatives in Israel.

Government sources and attorneys said the Pentagon has sought and succeeded in removing security clearance from dozens of Americans, mostly Jews, who either lived, worked or have relatives in Israel. Official documents report that American Jews, employed by major defense contractors and denied access to military projects, were asked by Pentagon examiners whether they would join a U.S. attack on Israel and abandon their relatives if the Jewish state was threatened.

OK. What about people with Islamic connections? No such policies.

What about people with ChiCom connections? No such policies, as evidenced by numerous problems with ChiCom intel activities involving “former” and even current nationals who have been active in passing US technical and military information to THEM.

What’s wrong with this picture? If the Chief got started in the vein of Emile Zola with an “I accuse…” rant, it would be hard to find a place to stop.

Gaza militants say fired chemical-tipped warhead

A spokesman for gunmen in the Gaza Strip said they had fired a rocket tipped with a chemical warhead at Israel early on Thursday.

The group had recently claimed to possess about 20 biological warheads for the makeshift rockets commonly fired from Gaza at Israeli towns. This was the first time the group had claimed firing such a rocket.

This speaks for itself. And Israel is supposed to make deals with these? Give me a break!

Senate warms to ‘border first’

Key backers of the Senate immigration bill said yesterday they are willing to consider a compromise that would delay the guest-worker program and “amnesty” portions until the borders have been secured.

Pennsylvania chief RINO Spector must have been clubbed (at least partially) by a cluebat:

The proposal was floated by Senate Judiciary Chairman Arlen Specter in an interview Monday with editors and reporters at The Washington Times.

The McCainiac chimed in on this also:

“I think it’s worth discussing,” said Sen. John McCain, Arizona Republican. “Many of us have said we could work on border enforcement and, at the same time, work on other aspects that would take more time.”

Even Donk Senator Ted (hic) Kennedy trying to get on this train?!

Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, Massachusetts Democrat, said a delay will occur anyway because it will take a few years to set up the guest-worker program and the structure to process millions of illegal aliens onto a pathway to citizenship.

It looks to the Chief like these Senators have gotten mugged by the reality that there was no way that their plans would have cleared the conference committee with the House without major changes.

U.S. rejects limits on personal guns

There is a UN small-arms conference in session. Due to a heads-up from the NRA there has been a huge response to the possibility that there would be international treaty restrictions sought on private firearms ownership.

Remarkably, and rarely enough, Kofi(cup) Annan and the conference chair have both publicly denied that the UN had any such plan. Their explanation is that their objective is to try to control the international trade in ILLEGAL arms, and that they had no interest in what nations do to regulate internal legal arms.

The US has also responded with disclaimers of its own:

The United States will oppose any international effort to limit access of U.S. civilians to legal firearms but supports stronger controls on arms imports and exports, a senior State Department official said yesterday. “The United States believes it is important for all of us to speak with one voice concerning the grave matter of the international illicit trade in small arms and light weapons,” said Robert Joseph, the undersecretary of state for arms control and international security.

The Chief sees this as nothing but encouraging, with the caveat that you can believe as much as you want to of what ANYONE at the UN says. I wouldn’t bet my life on their goodwill on this issue, or on anything else that they have to say, for that matter.

Bruno, the first bear in Germany for 170 years, is killed

The Chief took note of the first wild bear in Germany since the 1830’s. After repeated efforts to deal non-lethaly with the problem, the Polizei called in Finnish hunters to try to tranq the bear, but he never returned to previous sighting locations, and was starting to feel at ease in human settings. Ooops! Bad move!

A young brown bear that rampaged its way across the German and Austrian Alps and provoked diplomatic tensions between several countries was shot dead yesterday. A hunter in Bavaria stalked the bear, known as Bruno, and killed it after lengthy and expensive attempts to capture it and send it to a zoo failed.

There is one amusing aspect to this that COULD have resulted in lessening the infestation of animal-rights wackos, had things turned out differently.

After the orders to shoot Bruno, animal rights campaigners said they would dress up as bears and range the forests in an attempt to confuse hunters so that the real bear could get away. But their efforts failed to spare Bruno.

Too bad – the hunters got the real bear before these candidates for the Darwin Awards were able to achieve their goal.

‘Two-noses’ need a home

At first glance they look like perfectly normal puppies.

But these two pups have “four noses” – two each – which might explain why they were abandoned on the streets of London last week.

Awwwwwwwww.

Since lots of Brits are Animal Lovers, the Chief thinks it’s a fair bet that these dogs will rapidly find homes, especially since they will always be ahead by a nose…er…or is that a head with a nose to spare…whatever. The Chief gets the scent of a lot of possibilities for word play here.

Breaking the ‘hockey stick’

It’s been a busy week for climate buffs and spin-meisters as the National Academy of Sciences released its eagerly awaited report on past climate change. Its origin is the scientific debate about the iconic “hockey stick,” the graph published by Michael Mann and colleagues that showed a smooth decline in temperature since A.D. 1000 with a sudden warming in the 20th century, presumably caused by burning of fossil fuels…

Global warming partisans, including some scientists and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the U.N. science panel, embraced the hockey stick as “evidence” for greenhouse warming. This, even though the hockey stick denied the existence of natural climate fluctuations: the well-established Medieval Warm Period around A.D. 1000, when Vikings grew crops in Greenland, and the Little Ice Age, from about A.D. 1400 to A.D. 1850, when summer harvests failed and rivers and lakes froze over during severe winters.

There’s more on this in the article, and even more detail found at the Junk Science web site.

Bush hits news leak of terror tracking

A clearly incensed President Bush yesterday called the public disclosure of a secret terrorist-tracking program “disgraceful,” and he defended his decision to allow U.S. counterterrorism analysts to obtain international financial records as a key tool in the war against terror. “We’re at war with a bunch of people who want to hurt the United States of America, and for people to leak that program, and for a newspaper to publish it, does great harm,” the president told reporters in the White House’s Roosevelt Room.

Sounds like merely calling a spade a spade, and so is this OpEd from Michael Barone:

Revelation risks…

Why do they hate us? No, I’m not talking about Islamofascist terrorists. We know why they hate us: because we have freedom of speech and freedom of religion, because we refuse to treat women as second-class citizens, because we do not kill homosexuals, because we are a free society.

No, the “they” I’m referring to are the editors of the New York Times. And do they hate us? Well, that may be stretching it. But at the least they have gotten into the habit of acting in reckless disregard of our safety.

Hear, hear!

The Chief has noted some talking head apologists noting that without proving intent, no treason could stick. The Chief admitedly has not had the lobotomizing experience of law school, or journalism school, but a simple reading of the relevant law is illuminating:

23 USC 115
Section 2381. Treason

Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.

The Chief doesn’t see any qualifier for “intent”. The action of “giving aid and comfort” should be sufficient to complete the offense.

If they do the crime, they should do the time – at LEAST:

Ropes. Editors, reporters, sources. Trees. Some assembly required.

Rip up Human Rights Act, says Cameron

This COULD be a possible antidote to the previous posting. One can hope!

The Tories will try to outflank Labour on law and order today by promising to tear up the Human Rights Act and replace it with a Bill of Rights.

Their leader, David Cameron, will announce what he calls a home-grown “enduring solution” to the problem of British laws being overridden by the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. But he will say that a Conservative government would stay within the European convention on human rights.

Family life faces State ‘invasion’

This is utterly chilling! The UK is moving toward something worse than what happened in the 3rd Reich, or in the bad old days of Stalin’s USSR. Another chilling thought: what if some of the flaky US judges look at THIS as an example of foriegn law that they want to unconstitutionally “import”?

Government surveillance of all children, including information on whether they eat five portions of fruit and vegetables a day, will be condemned tomorrow as a Big Brother system. Experts say it is the biggest state intrusion in history into the role of parents.

I guess it “takes a village”, and a supercomputer:

Changes being introduced since Victoria Climbié’s death from abuse include a £224 million database tracking all 12 million children in England and Wales from birth. The Government expects the programme to be operating within two years.

But critics say the electronic files will undermine family privacy and destroy the confidentiality of medical, social work and legal records.

No shit, Sherlock! What was the first clue!

Doctors, schools and the police will have to alert the database to a wide range of “concerns”. Two warning flags on a child’s record could start an investigation. There will also be a system of targets and performance indicators for children’s development. Children’s services have been told to work together to make sure that targets are met.

Fortunately there is at least some voice of sanity remaining over there:

Child care academics, practitioners and policy experts attending a conference at the London School of Economics will express concern about how the system will work.

Dr Eileen Munro, of the LSE, said that if a child caused concern by failing to make progress towards state targets, detailed information would be gathered. That would include subjective judgments such as “Is the parent providing a positive role model?”, as well as sensitive information such as a parent’s mental health. “They include consuming five portions of fruit and veg a day, which I am baffled how they will measure,” she said. “The country is moving from ‘parents are free to bring children up as they think best as long as they are not abusive or neglectful’ to a more coercive ‘parents must bring children up to conform to the state’s views of what is best’.”

This is just too creepy for words. The Chief can hardly believe that things have gone so far over there that this sort of scheme can be seriously proposed. If this is (God forbid!) actually emplaced, it will be Amen to the existance of Britain – they might as well go the rest of the way and just call it “Airstrip One” and get it over with.

NYT and National Security

There’s a lot of stuff out there on the web, and SDP has about as good a read on this as anyone.

The Chief has to agree with Congressman Peter King – The NYT should be up on treason charges, but unfortunately he has no confidence that there are enough gonads in the administration to slap these seditious traitors down the way their actions deserve.

F.E.T.E.

Saddam Thinks U.S. Will Beg for His Help

Saddam Hussein believes the United States will have to seek his help to quell the bloody insurgency in Iraq and open the way for U.S. forces to withdraw, his chief lawyer said Sunday.

The Chief can only think of one thing to say here: definitely a case of poor situational awareness!

Utah tests GOP alien policy

Republicans are betting their control of the House on the issue of immigration, and no test case is being watched more closely than the party’s primary election here.

Five-term Rep. Chris Cannon says he opposes amnesty for the estimated 10 million to 12 million illegal aliens in the United States, but supports a “guest-worker” program that would allow them to stay in the country indefinitely. Challenger John Jacob, a local developer and political novice who forced the primary by defeating Mr. Cannon at the Republican convention last month, calls such proposals “amnesty” and says Mr. Cannon should be removed from office. “We need to stop up the borders now,” he said in a taped debate last week on the University of Utah’s public television station.

Stay tuned. This is an interesting one for a number of reasons.

S. Dakota to mark I-90 in odd way

The Chief often takes exception to the Argus’s Dave Kranz, but this observation of a wierd event is truly justifed.

How do you commemorate the anniversary of an interstate highway? That has some people curious about Monday’s marking of the 50th anniversary of President Eisenhower signing the Federal-Aid Highway Act. That certainly means a celebration in South Dakota, but what they have planned is a bit strange.

Key transportation personnel will travel from Sioux Falls to Rapid City as part of the observation.

Now the strange part. Travel Interstate 90?

Nope. They will travel by airplane.

Sort of remninds the Chief of something from Monty Python, or National Lampoon.

Sect inspired ‘leader of Sears Tower plot’

Last night the Chief saw a group of talking heads on FoX News, with one of them claiming that the 7 arrested for plotting to take down the had no obvious commonality. Get a clue guy – the blank spot in your consciouslness needs to be filled by the word ISLAMOFASCISM.

Of course these guys do have their very own wierd form of it, but it sure is the commonality between them!

No Tolls on The Internet

The Chief has noted in passing, a number of postings, articles, etc. concerning the issue of “net neutrality”. There is a lot of confusion on this out there.

This piece adds some clarity. Worth checking out, in spite of the source.

Tiny Temptations to Tyranny

A jaundiced view of the state of airport security:

Hundreds of people shuffled along like Stalinist peasants queuing up for loaves of sawdusty bread. But these weren’t peasants. These were America’s formerly best and brightest. They inched along with their heads down, faces blank, their manner servile and subdued. A few couples, families, or small groups talked with each other to pass the endless waits. But smiles seemed forced, conversations stilted. Like the conversations of East Berliners, always knowing “the authorities” are listening.

Heavily armed guards scanned the crowd of disarmed peasants passengers. The cowed crowd (which the Department of Homeland (Achtung!) Security insists are its “customers”) — shuffled toward portals to be “serviced” (I use the word advisedly) by TSA agents.

There’s more, much more.

On the other hand, there really IS a terror war, and being hijacked WOULD be a serious bummer!

On the other hand, if law-abiding folks could arm themselves, there would be no need for sky marshals, etc. – terrs would quickly learn that they would have to deal with some wolves among the sheeple.

You pays your money, and makes your choices – at least one CAN still travel without this sort of crap if you really want to. So far.

China pleased after watching U.S. wargames

What’s wrong with this picture?

Chinese military observers said Thursday that observing U.S. military exercises in the Pacific this week gave them a better understanding of U.S. weapons and tactics.

What’s not for them to be happy about here? They got a box-seat view of US capabilities. (The better to devise means of countering them?!) The US gets – nothing.

Delegation leader Rear Adm. Zhang Leiyu called the visit to the war games near Guam “a positive step in China-U.S. military ties,” the official Xinhua News agency reported.

This leads to fuzzy-brained moonbattery at its worst:

Zhang’s assessment of the exercises will likely be welcomed by exchange advocates, who argue Chinese exposure to advanced U.S. capabilities reduces the chances of misunderstandings or clashes.

Right – if we tell them everything we are doing, that will make them trust that we aren’t trying to surprise them, and this will make them be nice to us.

Yeah. Right. If you believe THAT about the ChiComs, please e-mail me about a great bargain I have for tropical beachfront property here in Moody County, South Dakota. It won’t be necessary fory you to visit to inspect it first either, you can take my word for it, right?

Iran Death Judge Lands U.N. Seat On Human Rights

This should NOT be news – just same old, same old for the UN.

Iran’s delegation to the U.N. Human Rights Council faces being isolated by the envoys of free nations this week after it emerged that its leader is one of Iran’s most notorious censors and prosecutors of dissidents who the Canadians hold responsible for acquitting those who raped and murdered one of their female citizens.

The infamous Saeed Mortazavi this week led Iran’s delegation in Geneva to the first session of the United Nation’s newly reconfigured human rights panel on Monday, even though Iran is not a member of that panel. Mr. Mortazavi is accused by the Canadian government of playing a role in the rape and murder of a woman journalist and photographer, is credited with closing more than 100 newspapers, and was responsible not only for jailing the students who led the July 9, 1999, pro-democracy demonstrations in Tehran but of clearing the security officials accused of torturing them.

Hopefully another nail contributed to building the Kofi-n coffin for the UN.

The intelligence game is played differently in dictatorships

Lev Navrozom, as disturbing as he often is on geopolitical issues, is also well worth attention. He casts a jaundiced eye on our national security situation relating to borders, documentation, and espionage.

Most enlightening!

RAFTS

Bill Whittle, who IMHO is arguably the best political/social essayist on the American scene since Thomas Paine, has just posted his latest effort on his EJECT! EJECT! EJECT! site.

When you have the time and opportunity to ingest this intellectual meal, check it out. It is DEFINITELY worth the time!

Just a teaser:

Humans are animals. I do not mean that in a negative way. But that is what we are: creatures capable of great good and great harm, susceptible to animal fears and passions, lower than angels but not without grace. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn – a man who has seen a fair amount of both good and evil – wrote of that fault line, “that line separating good and evil, passing not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties, but right through every human heart.”

As animals, we are wired to live in a state of nature. In the long marathon of our history, our civilizations are only the last two or three halting steps. It took millions of years to design and build the human animal. It will likely take that long again to design out all of the passions and furies that brought us here.

Until then, we live with a choice: to live in a state of nature, or a state of law. The state of nature is the default condition that the huge majority of human lives has lived under, and continue to live under to this very day – lives solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short in Hobbes’ memorable phrase. Or, we can chose to impose upon our internal fault line a series of laws and customs, a Civilization, that imperfectly attempts to keep as many of us as possible on the side of the angels.

Your brain WILL be positively stimulated! Whittle is a MUST READ! Do it!

Mexico Worries About It’s Own Southern Border

Here at Mexico’s own southern edge, Guatemalans cross legally and illegally to do jobs that Mexicans departing for the north no longer want. And hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants from nearly two dozen other countries, including China, Ecuador, Cuba and Somalia, pass through on their way to the United States.

Even as Mexico agitates for an open border with the US, it has fierce laws against illegals trying to get into Mexico from the south.

Few politicians have made public speeches about such matters. But Deputy Foreign Minister Gerónimo Gutiérrez recently acknowledged that Mexico’s immigration laws were “tougher than those being contemplated by the United States,” where the authorities caught 1.5 million people illegally crossing the Mexican border last year.

Untroubled by any semblence of legal consistancy, the Mexican election campaigns continue to push for more open conditions on the US border. The Chief would say, hey! If it’s sauce for the Mexican goose, it should work for the American gander! Throw their own laws back in their faces!

California looks to replicate Oregon’s assisted suicide law

This has to be a classic case of legal doublethink.

Firstly as noted in this post, courts have ruled to allow challenge of lethal injection as a means of execution.

Secondly, in this report now, the right to have medical assisted suicide is being promoted for California in addition to Oregon.

So it’s OK to have a Doc kill you if you ask him, but if he is acting in behalf of the state to execute you, then there’s a possible problem.

Why does this picture not make sense?