Bush Declines To Exclude Nuclear Strike On Iran
Okay, this is from Roto-Reuters, but anything that keeps those kooks on their toes is fine by me.

The fateful hour has arrived By Caroline B. Glick
From Jewish World Review. A very sobering article. Worth reading in its entirety.

Donald Rumsfeld
This is a great Rumsfeld page... it includes his (impressive!) bio, pix, and, my favorite, Rummy quotes. Lovelovelove this guy!

Q: Mr. Rumsfeld, some experts are saying the insurgency in Iraq could last 10 years or more. Is this possible, in your estimation?



SEC. RUMSFELD: Who are these experts?



Q: It’s all over CNN…



SEC. RUMSFELD: Oh, CNN -- come now.

And an all-time fave:

We would be happy to capture them, we'd be happy to have them surrender, and if they don't, we'd be happy to kill them.

Now this is a guy I would love to have dinner with.

Moderate Islam: Immoral to employ women--Eatery Owner Flees to Escape Lashing:

"JORDAN TIMES 18 April '06'Conference on moderate Islam to unite int'l
scholars'
QUOTES FROM TEXT:
'Muslm thinkers and religious leaders ... hopes to establish an
international assembly promoting moderate Islam
'practical mechanisms to clarify the tainted image of Islam'
By Mahmoud Al Abed
AMMAN - A meeting of Muslim thinkers and religious leaders next week hopes
to establish an international assembly promoting moderate Islam, according
to a conference spokesperson.
The Moderation Assembly for Thought and Culture expects the event to yield
practical mechanisms to clarify the tainted image of Islam,' according to a
statement issued by the Jordanian group.
. . .The international forum and its partners would carry the banner of
moderation in Islam and promote tolerance and democratic pluralism, in
addition to establishing distinctions between legitimate resistance and
terrorism."

Good luck, guys. Besides, if you're serious, you'll end up on some "Brotherhood"'s death list.

Then there's this:

QATIF, 18 April 2006 - Nabel Al-Ramadan, owner of "Ranoosh" restaurant here,
told Arab News in a phone interview that he has left the Kingdom in a bid to
fight his sentence of 90 lashes for employing two women in his restaurant
one and a half years ago. He left the Kingdom more than a week ago.
Al-Ramadan was accused of violating morality by employing women in his
restaurant on Aug. 10, 2004. He was sentenced only last month after about a
19-month court battle after he was reported for his breach.
"I appeal against the judgment because it is an insult to me as a human
being. In order to avoid this situation I preferred to travel before the
application of the sentence," said Al-Ramadan.
The two girls were wearing hijab while working, Al-Ramadan said, adding both
himself and the girls respected Islam and Saudi traditions, and didn't do
anything that contradicted Shariah.
The girls worked for four hours only on a single day before authorities
closed down the restaurant the same day.
But that still caused problems for Al-Ramadan, which started with him being
jailed briefly before being released. The case was reopened recently.
Al-Ramadan was not allowed to take a lawyer with him when he was called to
the Qatif court.
"I was informed that the court wanted me to attend the trial to investigate
the employment of two girls and was told that the hearing was to be on March
25," said the restaurant owner.
"I went to the court on March 22 just to receive the papers but the judge on
hearing that I was there asked to see me. He didn't give me a chance to hire
a lawyer and sentenced me to 90 lashes - spread over 30 lashes a time. The
judgment was announced after only a quarter of an hour."
Al-Ramadan preferred to leave the country quickly because he feared that the
swift decision against him could mean that it would be meted out quickly.

Mortuary Owner Calls Cindy Sheehan A Liar
She's quite a piece of work, this woman. I cannot wait 'til she just goes away.

Fast cars and fast living at heart of Malibu mystery
Just a totally bizarro story.

Update here: Swedish businessman pleads not guilty in LA ~ Crashed Ferrari ~ bail set at $5.5 million

HUMAN EVENTS ONLINE - Student Sculpts With Conservative Firepower by Christopher Flickinger

HUMAN EVENTS ONLINE - Student Sculpts With Conservative Firepower by Christopher Flickinger

eBay: Gold Diamond Protection Ring To Fight Muslim Terrorists (item 8924993071 end time Apr-18-06 12:58:39 PDT)
LOL!!

"Dime not included."

Clueless Joe Wilson
Christopher Hitchens, originally here, at Slate. Tons of additional info on the FR thread.

Suspect In Girls Death Profiles Life On Web
Way too much creepycreepy information.

Poll: Sinking Perceptions Of Islam

(CBS) Although Americans believe they are better informed about Islam than they were five years ago, a new CBS News poll finds fewer than one in five say their impression of the religion is favorable.

A FReeper stole my response before I could make it:

That's such a funny, typical liberal sentence. "Although" Americans are better informed. How about BECAUSE Americans are better informed?? Idiots. They just don't get it.

26 posted on 04/12/2006 8:52:01 PM CDT by Huck

Another Day, Another Embarrassing Intelligence-Related Correction (NY Times correction)
We start off our day with a story that the Times was losing money, therefore we must end it with yet another NYTimes correction. No matter how much money they lose, they can't help but print the news as they wish it really was (as opposed to what it is):

Another Day, Another Embarrassing Intelligence-Related Correction Posted by: Clay Waters 4/14/2006 11:59:09 AM

After correcting itself on the Lewis Libby leak yesterday, the Times on Friday corrects another Bush-related intelligence story by reporter Eric Lichtblau that brought much criticism from conservative bloggers like PowerLine.

This is what Lichtblau falsely claimed March 29: “In a rare glimpse into the inner workings of the secretive court, known as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, several former judges who served on the panel also voiced skepticism at a Senate hearing about the president's constitutional authority to order wiretapping on Americans without a court order.”

Today the Times admits: “An article on March 29 about congressional hearings on the Bush administration's program of domestic eavesdropping referred imprecisely to testimony about the secretive court known as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which requires warrants for eavesdropping under most circumstances. While two former judges said they believed that Mr. Bush was bound by federal laws governing intelligence gathering, they did not explicitly express skepticism about whether he has the constitutional authority to order wiretapping on Americans without a court order.”

As Times Watch pointed out at the time, “Lichtblau doesn’t quote any of the judges actually voicing that skepticism about Bush’s actions -- skepticism Lichtblau certainly feels, judging by his slanted reporting in the past.”

Iran President Again Lashes Out at Israel, says it is heading towards "annihilation".

By ALI AKBAR DAREINI, Associated Press Writer1 hour, 26 minutes ago

The president of Iran again lashed out at Israel on Friday and said it was "heading toward annihilation," just days after Tehran raised fears about its nuclear activities by saying it successfully enriched uranium for the first time.

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad called Israel a "permanent threat" to the Middle East that will "soon" be liberated. He also appeared to again question whether the Holocaust really happened.

"Like it or not, the Zionist regime is heading toward annihilation," Ahmadinejad said at the opening of a conference in support of the Palestinians. "The Zionist regime is a rotten, dried tree that will be eliminated by one storm."

Ahmadinejad provoked a world outcry in October when he said Israel should be "wiped off the map."

On Friday, he repeated his previous line on the Holocaust, saying: "If such a disaster is true, why should the people of this region pay the price? Why does the Palestinian nation have to be suppressed and have its land occupied?"

The land of Palestine, he said, referring to the British mandated territory that includes all of Israel, Gaza and the West Bank, "will be freed soon."

Ruh roh.

THE CROSSES THEY CANNOT BEAR
Malkin has picked up the cross on the continued evidence of leftists' tolerance. The real shocker here? A US university's president with actual stones:

HIGHLAND HEIGHTS - A professor at Northern Kentucky University said she invited students in one of her classes to destroy an anti-abortion display on campus Wednesday evening. NKU police are investigating the incident, in which 400 crosses were removed from the ground near University Center and thrown in trash cans. The crosses, meant to represent a cemetery for aborted fetuses, had been temporarily erected last weekend by a student Right to Life group with permission from NKU officials.

Public universities cannot ban such displays because they are a type of symbolic speech that has been protected by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Witnesses reported "a group of females of various ages" committing the vandalism about 5:30 p.m., said Dave Tobertge, administrative sergeant with the campus police.

Sally Jacobsen, a longtime professor in NKU's literature and language department, said the display was dismantled by about nine students in one of her graduate-level classes.

"I did, outside of class during the break, invite students to express their freedom-of-speech rights to destroy the display if they wished to," Jacobsen said.

Asked whether she participated in pulling up the crosses, the professor said, "I have no comment."

She said she was infuriated by the display, which she saw as intimidating and a "slap in the face" to women who might be making "the agonizing and very private decision to have an abortion."

Jacobsen said it originally wasn't clear who had placed the crosses on campus.

She said that could make it appear that NKU endorsed the message.

Pulling up the crosses was similar to citizens taking down Nazi displays on Fountain Square, she said.

"Any violence perpetrated against that silly display was minor compared to how I felt when I saw it. Some of my students felt the same way, just outraged," Jacobsen said.

NKU President James Votruba said any evidence of criminal conduct in the incident will be turned over to prosecutors. He said he appreciated the emotional nature of the abortion debate and was glad that diverse viewpoints are represented at the school, but he condemned the destruction of the crosses.

"Freedom-of-speech rights end where you infringe on someone else's freedom of speech," Votruba said.

"I don't buy the claim that this is an act of freedom of speech, to destroy property."

He said he was gathering information about the extent of Jacobsen's participation.

"I don't know if she was pulling up the crosses, but I think she was out there with the students. If so, as far as I'm concerned, she went outside the conditions of her employment," Votruba said.

N.Y. Times Leads Newspaper $hortfalls
The New York Post editors must have giggled as they typeset this one. I love Dinosaur Media Extinction Alerts.

Analysts say newspapers are pressured by circulation declines, higher costs and loss of ad dollars to the Internet and other new media.

The Times, publisher of the Boston Globe and International Herald Tribune, said profits fell to $35 million, or 24 cents a share, from $111 million, or 76 cents a share, a year earlier.

I guess being "Fake But Accurate" has stopped paying off.

All in all, a lovely way to begin the day.

Former President Clinton to speak at LBJ School Graduation
Now that we're hispanicized, is that El BJ?

Former President Clinton will give this year's commencement address to graduates at the University of Texas' Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs...

The jokes write themselves.

Anyway, there goes the neighborhood.

Brown is the New Black (Ann Coulter)
WOO HOO, it must be Wednesday night, and Miss Coulter does not disappoint:

This is the only country on Earth that thinks it's not sporting to consider our own interests in choosing immigrants. Try showing up in any other country on the planet, illiterate and penniless, and announcing: "I've seen pictures of your country and it looks great. I think I'd like to live here! Oh, and by the way, would you mind changing all your government and business phone messages, street signs and ballots into my native language? Thanks!" They would laugh you out of the country.

What seems not to have occurred to the "NO HUMAN BEING IS ILLEGAL" crowd is that this is a country, not a public park.

There are more than 6 billion people in the world, many of whom apparently like the idea of living in the wealthiest democracy on Earth. But if the billions of people of the world did live here, it wouldn't be "here" anymore. America is special for a reason that must transcend the right to vote — or everyone would be trying to immigrate to Iraq right now.

America has a seller's market in immigration, but thanks to Teddy Kennedy's 1965 immigration law, we no longer favor skilled workers from developed nations, but instead favor unskilled immigrants from the Third World. Kennedy's bill promptly cut the number of European immigrants in half and increased Third World immigrants to 85 percent of the total.

Not surprisingly, post-1965 immigrants have sharply higher levels of poverty and welfare dependence. Europeans may not seem like ideal new immigrants, but the truth is, if what they want is welfare, they'll stay in France.

It's as if we've got the last Xbox 360s available on Christmas Eve and instead of doubling the price, we're entertaining low-ball offers. Or more accurately, we're paying our customers to take the darn things off our hands — and the customers are still indignant with us.

On CNN's "Lou Dobbs Tonight" on Monday, Dobbs was interviewing Nativo Lopez, president of the Mexican-American Political Association about his demand for "full immediate, unconditional legalization for all persons currently in the United States."

Dobbs posed this innocuous question about Lopez's planned boycott, "You're talking about a boycott of all illegal aliens in this country?"

Lopez exploded: "Well, first off, I refute your terminology. You don't say 'kike,' 'patty,' 'WOP,' OK. You don't say "nigger"! ... You're using language that's offensive to me and offensive to my people! ... You pollute the air every day, Dobbs. ... That language is offensive, it's derogatory, it's denigrating, and don't use that terminology to me again, referring to my people!"

Dobbs eventually ended Lopez's Tourette's episode by calmly asking him what he expected the impact of the boycott to be.

An hour later on MSNBC's "Hardball," Dave Rodriguez, of the League of United Latin American Citizens, leapt in to denounce Rep. Tom Tancredo for using the word "amnesty." He said: "There isn't any such thing as amnesty in this law. I don't understand what this debate is. That's your own terminology on it ..."

Bank robbers and drug dealers ought to start claiming that the words "bank robber" and "drug dealer" are akin to the N-word. They could accuse lawmakers of "criminalizing felonies" and claim they don't understand what the word "jailbreak" means.

At the same time on CNN's "The Situation Room," Maria Elena Salinas, an anchor at Univision, was informing Wolf Blitzer that "all Hispanics feel offended by what has been going on, by the rhetoric, the level of the negativity that you hear coming out of Capitol Hill and also on some television stations and by some journalists."

So it's really more like we've got the last Xbox 360s available on Christmas Eve and the customers are not only demanding money to take the hottest sales item off our hands, but are verbally abusing us and acting petulant. I'm offended that you would even think about asking me to pay for the Xbox 360! You say it has a "20 GB detachable hard drive"? Well, would you use the word "kike"?

As hardworking as illegal immigrants are when they come here, they are immediately demagogued by liberals into adopting the victimhood pose so popular on college campuses. Everybody wants to act like his ancestors were brought here on slave ships.

Consider this e-mail from Michele Waslin, La Raza's director of Immigration Policy Research, to her members denouncing Sen. Lamar Alexander's proposal to provide government grants to immigrants who want to learn English and American history and to organizations offering those courses. (I'd be happy with a law that simply trained new immigrants not to be "offended" all the time.)

Even though this potentially meant free money for La Raza, Waslin — of the Guadalajara Waslins — ominously warned that while the amendment "doesn't overtly mention assimilation, it is very strong on the patriotism and traditional American values language in a way which is potentially dangerous to our communities."

Meanwhile, Americans aren't allowed to consider whether millions of immigrants refusing to learn English and American history is "potentially dangerous to our communities." Here, please — we'll pay you, just take the whole Xbox 360 factory.

Hands off 9/11 cross (Port Authority rethinks plans to remove WTC icon)

The Port Authority scrapped plans yesterday to uproot and lock away the steel cross at Ground Zero after revelations about the move in the Daily News sparked an uproar. The iconic symbol - which has comforted many since the crossed beams were found in the rubble of the World Trade Center - was quietly headed for a hangar at Kennedy Airport in the fall to keep it safe during construction.

But an exclusive story about that plan in yesterday's News set off a wave of Holy Week horror from the religious community to construction unions - and the PA backed off.

"We recognize the importance of the crossed beams, which have been a fixture at the World Trade Center site since 9/11," the agency said in a statement.

"We are exploring opportunities to relocate this important artifact to a nearby accessible public location while construction moves forward."

Sources said the cross might end up on the Church St. side of St. Peter's Catholic Church, a block north of Ground Zero, until a permanent location is decided.

"If we can be of any help, we will be," said the Rev. Kevin Madigan, the pastor of St. Peter's. "The cross shouldn't be a cause for division, especially during Holy Week."

The Rev. Brian Jordan, who said many a Sunday Mass for Ground Zero recovery workers in the shadow of the cross, felt "betrayed" by the PA's plan for the cross.

"It can't end up in some dusty hangar out at Kennedy Airport," said Jordan, of St. Francis of Assisi Church in midtown. "To put it out there would be an outrageous defamation of a beautiful symbol."

Jordan, who favors St. Peter's as an interim location, said he was asked hundreds of times after 9/11, "Why did God do this?"

"I told everyone, 'God didn't do this. These were evil acts of men who abused their free will,'" he said. "But when the cross was found - we know it's a T-beam - it was visual evidence that God never abandoned us at Ground Zero."

Edward Malloy, president of the Building and Construction Trades Council of Greater New York, said his members helped recover and mount the cross and "they'd be reluctant to move it unless there was a commitment to make it part of the permanent memorial."

The West Can't Let Iran Have The Bomb (UK):

"With each week that passes, Iran's ayatollahs move closer to their goal of building an atom bomb.

This is not misinformed propaganda pumped out by trigger-happy yahoos on the wilder fringes of America's Republican Party. This is the opinion of the dedicated teams of nuclear experts attached to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in Vienna, whose task it is to sift through the highly complex science surrounding Iran's nuclear programme and to provide a considered judgment to the UN Security Council on the Iranians' ultimate objectives.

During three years of painstaking negotiations with Iran, Mohamed ElBaradei, the Nobel peace laureate who heads the IAEA, went out of his way to play along with the charade that Iran's nuclear ambitions were entirely peaceful and designed to develop an indigenous nuclear power industry. This, after all, is a country with known oil reserves in excess of 90 billion barrels, more than enough to meet its energy needs well into the next century.

Mr ElBaradei was even prepared to accept at face value the Iranians' shame-faced admission that their failure to disclose the existence of their massive nuclear enrichment plant at Natanz was no more than a bureaucratic oversight.

When the inspectors were finally granted admission, they were dumb-founded to find themselves in a 250,000-acre complex containing two vast underground bomb-proof bunkers designed for enriching uranium to weapons grade.

Mr ElBaradei is now prepared to concede that the Iranians have run out of excuses, and Teheran has been given until April 29 to implement a total freeze on its nuclear enrichment activities at Natanz and its other key plants, or face the wrath of the Security Council."

This article had me, until those last eight words. Then again, I've seen Team America...

But to judge by the Iranians' response so far, the threat of international condemnation and isolation does not appear to be causing sleepless nights.

Ya think?