Libertarian Leanings

Iraqi civilians fight back

Baghdad Dweller repeats a New York Times story in full.  It tells of of Iraqi civilians who opened fire on some terrorists.

As the gunmen emerged from their cars, Dhia and his young relatives shouldered their Kalashnikov rifles and opened fire, the police and witnesses said. In the fierce gun battle that followed, three of the insurgents were killed, and the rest fled just after the police arrived. Two of Dhia's nephews and a bystander were wounded, the police said.

"We attacked them before they attacked us," said Dhia, 35, his face still contorted with rage and excitement, as he stood barefoot outside his home a few hours after the battle, a 9-millimeter pistol in his hand. He would not give his last name.

"We killed three of those who call themselves the mujahedeen," he said. "I am waiting for the rest of them to come, and we will show them."

It was the first time that private citizens are known to have retaliated successfully against the insurgents. There have been anecdotal reports of residents shooting at attackers after a bombing or an assassination. But the gun battle on Tuesday erupted in full view of at least a dozen witnesses, including a Justice Ministry official who lives nearby.

Life and Liberty Interests

At the top of page one The Wall Street Journal Online (subscription required) carries the story that the U.S. federal appeals court in Atlanta has refused to order Terri Schiavo's feeding tube reinserted.  I find this a remarkable decision that follows in the tradition of Roe v. Wade.  In that decision justices offered that there was some doubt about when human life could be said to begin, then went on to deem it a constitutional right for that life to be terminated. 

In this case the appeals court refused to overturn the ruling of Judge James Whitemore of Tampa who in an exercise of Orwellian doublespeak found that her "life and liberty interests were adequately protected by the extensive process provided in the state courts."  I'd like to know how you arrive at the conclusion that her life is "adequately protected" when you're ruling to end it.

Yes, I know about the concept of the living will.  The question is, when she was able to say it, did she say she wouldn't want to be kept alive in the kind of a state she now is in.   Apparently, hearsay evidence, the word of her husband, is sufficient for the courts to rule that she did.  What seems not to be a question is if she might have changed her mind at any time.  How can anybody know?  In the absence of the written living will, I would think that the benefit of the doubt should go to life for Terri. 

Apparently, reasonable doubt seems not to apply, or if it does the benefit of it goes to the husband who, were it not for the fact of Terri Schiavo's continuing life, would be considered to be in a common law marriage with another woman with whom he has children.  Couldn't they rule that Terri is entitled to a common law divorce and let someone else speak for her? 

No.  In spite of all arguments from her parents who want to take care of her, and after she has been fed through a tube for 15 years, the courts seek to protect her "life and liberty interests" by removing the tube and letting her starve.  In fact, they will go further.  There can be no question that they will actively prevent her parents from feeding her.  Remarkable.

Questions

Today's Washington Times raises a question about the Terri Schiavo case.  Why didn't Michael Schiavo just divorce her and move on?

Why, they ask, does this muscular, 6-foot-7 Florida prison nurse refuse to divorce his wife, Terri, even though he has been living with another woman for 10 years and fathered two children with her?

A possible answer may be,

On CNN Sunday, Bobby Schindler said his brother-in-law stood to gain about $1 million in damages from a malpractice lawsuit he filed and won in late 1992. A jury awarded more than $700,000 for Mrs. Schiavo's care, and Mr. Schiavo received an additional $300,000.

"I don't know the financial situation of Terri's trust fund" today, Mr. Schindler said. He pointed out that Mr. Schiavo promised a jury 13 years ago that the money would be used for his wife's "rehabilitation and therapy."

"The money now has been used to pay Michael's attorneys in an effort to kill her. These financial documents have been sealed by the court," Mr. Schindler said.

On the other hand there is this.

A San Diego businessman's $1 million offer to Terri Schiavo's husband if he transfers responsibility for her care to her parents so the comatose woman can be kept alive is unacceptable, his attorney said in remarks published Friday...

Herring Thursday deposited $1 million into the client trust account at Allred's law firm, according to Robert D. Rosecrans, the vice president of National Bank of California, which handled the transaction. Allred said the written offer -- which is on the table until Monday at 5 p.m. PST -- was communicated to Michael Schiavo's attorney Thursday morning.

"I believe very strongly that there are medical advances happening around the globe that very shortly could have a positive impact on Terri's condition," said Herring, who lives in the San Diego area. "I have seen miraculous recoveries occur through the use of stem cells in patients suffering a variety of conditions."

But an attorney for Michael Schiavo said the offer won't be accepted.

Attorney George Felos told Florida's St. Petersburg Times that Michael Schiavo turned down a similar $10 million offer about two weeks ago made via an attorney for an anonymous Floridian.

It's a puzzling situation.  I don't get why our progressive elite seem consistently determined to end seemingly innocent human life.  And it's a strange coincidence that those who once so strongly, and rightly, favored federal intervention as in the Civil Rights Act, now argue the sanctity of states rights in the case of Terri Schiavo. 

And another thing.  Where is the National Organization of Women?  And where  are the rest of the feminists on this issue?

Each wave of the women's movement has asked the impossible, and in so doing, galvanized huge numbers of women. Speaking the unspeakable, asking for the moon, these are what the women's movement did once upon a time. They did it because women's lives were at stake. Women's lives are still at stake. Terri Schiavo is a woman, remember? That's all that matters. If denying equal protection under the law to women with disabilities through right-to-die laws isn't "violence against women" just what is?

Who is deserving of "rights"?  Who gets to decide?

Framing the debate

While surfing to and fro, I ran across this announcement of a talk by George Lakoff, Professor of Cognitive Science and Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley:  Tonight: Cognitive Linguistics and Politics.  What a shame... we missed it.  Lakoff is apparently a Noam Chomsky wannabee, being a professor of linguistics and all, and using it as his springboard into progressive politics. 

The links in the announcement take you to a plug for Lakoff's book, Don't Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate (A Progressive Guide to Action) where you find an excerpt for a book review by Marc Cooper. The review is appropriately titled Thinking of Jackasses: The grand delusions of the Democratic Party.  This from a contributing editor of The Nation.  The review is a beauty.

Just a few weeks after the November election House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (a veritable totem of blue-state liberalism) invited Lakoff to come in and coach the Democratic caucus in this new way of thinking. Other liberal members of Congress distributed hundreds of copies of his book to Hill staffers. Lakoff's slim volume has now had multiple printings, and its small Vermont-based publisher predicts that half a million copies will eventually be sold. "What are there?" Margo Baldwin, of Lakoff's publishing house, said to the Los Angeles Times as she estimated the market. "Fifty million unhappy Democrats out there?"

Baldwin's off-the-cuff remark betrays the real reason for Lakoff's sudden popularity. Much more than an offering of serious political strategy, Don't Think of an Elephant! is a feel-good self-help book for a stratum of despairing liberals who just can't believe how their commonsense message has been misunderstood by the eternally deceived masses. Liberal values are American values, they say, but somehow Americans just keep getting tricked -- by Fox News, Sinclair Broadcasting, AM talk radio, conservative think tanks -- into thinking and voting against their own interests.

So what's an earnest, honest liberal to do when nobody wants to hear the truth? Why not turn to personal therapy disguised as politics, psychobabble as electoral strategy? Lakoff, revealingly, provides nary a word on reshaping the Democratic Party itself, blunting the influence of corporate cash, eliminating the stranglehold on the party and its candidates by discredited but omni-powerful consultants, reversing its estrangement from the white working class, finding some decent candidates, or just about anything else that might require actual strategic thinking, organizing, and politicking. Never mind. What liberals most need to do, Lakoff says, is "be the change you want."

This is not to disparage as self-indulgent, latte-sipping navel-gazers and whiners the 48 percent of the electorate that voted Democratic. But Limbaugh-driven stereotypes aside, the Democratic liberal and activist crust does indeed seem ever more in denial about the depth of its defeat, about its detachment from what it claims as its "traditional base," and about its apparent willingness to pursue little more than a self-referential, self-indulgent political aesthetic.

Nancy Pelosi certainly seems to epitomize the latte-sipping, navel-gazing, whiners who are so pathetically out of touch with America.

Irony

i·ro·ny   

n. pl. i·ro·nies

1. 1. The use of words to express something different from and often opposite to their literal meaning.

From the Washington Times,

Congress last night passed legislation aimed at saving the life of Terri Schiavo, the brain-damaged Florida woman whose feeding tube was removed Friday, and President Bush was expected to immediately sign the measure.

"How can we live with ourselves if we don't give her one more chance," said House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, Texas Republican.

The House passed the bill, 203-58, after midnight...

"Terri has a brain injury, but otherwise she's healthy," said Rep. Joe Pitts, Pennsylvania Republican. "We do not let people starve an animal to death. We do not let them starve a prisoner to death."

"Terri Schiavo is not on life support," said Rep. F. James Sensenbrenner Jr., Wisconsin Republican, who was a key negotiator on the legislation. "To starve someone to death ... is one of the most cruel and inhumane ways to die."

Opponents argued Congress is way out of line.

"It is not the place of Congress, at the 11th hour, to intervene in the most abusive fashion to undermine the Florida court system," said Rep. Robert Wexler, Florida Democrat.

"If we do not draw the line in the sand today, there's no telling what constitutional principles this Congress will trample next," said Rep. Jim Davis, another Florida Democrat who opposed the bill.

Democrats have admired the Florida court system for some years now.

Sunnis turning on al Qaeda

From Strategy Page:

March 20, 2005: While many Sunni Arabs still support al Qaeda, a growing number of key tribes and families do not. Worse yet, for the terrorists, Sunni Arab tribes, clans and families are increasingly at war with al Qaeda. Sunni Arabs are killing al Qaeda groups they believe were responsible for the death of family or friends. But it's also about money, and war crimes trials. 

The government controls the oil, and the oil revenue is given out in the form of jobs, bribes and all manner of good things. The coalition also controls billions in foreign aid. This also gets disbursed in the form of jobs and purchases. The coalition also has very effective soldiers that make sure the Sunni Arabs don't cheat when they take money. No longer can Sunni Arabs join the police, and still work with the terrorists. If you want to be a cop, you have to act like one. 

The Sunni Arabs never expected all this armed resistance, to Shia and Kurdish rule, to get Sunnis back in power. What they want is a deal on the question of war crimes trials and revenge in general for their complicity in Saddam's decades of atrocities. The armed resistance gives the Sunni Arabs something to bargain with. Of course, the major members of Saddam's gang will go to trial, but there are thousands of lesser officials, nearly all of them Sunni Arabs, who also have blood on their hands, and real concerns about prosecution (legal, or otherwise.) Negotiations have been intense, and many of the Sunni Arab clans and families involved have begun to actively battle al Qaeda gangs in their neighborhoods. These groups are a mixture of Iraqis and foreigners, and are basically armed religious fanatics. There's no negotiating with them, and the terrorists don't apologize if one of their suicide bombers accidentally kills a lot of Sunni Arab civilians. It's Gods will, and all that. Increasingly, Sunni Arabs are fed up with this, and killing al Qaeda in their vicinity, or driving the fanatics out. It will be difficult to prosecute a lot of lesser war criminals who have recently become heroes by fighting al Qaeda. 

Al Qaeda members won't negotiate with the Sunni Arabs over compromising with the new Iraqi government. According to al Qaeda belief, the new Iraqi government is illegitimate. The government is the creature of a democratic vote, which al Qaeda considers un-Islamic. Only God can decide such things, not the votes of the people. Moreover, this illegitimate government also allows foreign, non-Moslem, troops to stay in Iraq. 

Given a choice between a job with the police or government, and more terrorist violence, the majority of Sunni Arabs are going with peace and paychecks. Each household is allowed to have one weapon, usually an AK-47. The government tolerates, for the moment, clan and tribal chiefs  maintaining personal security forces, which sometimes amount to hundreds of armed men. As long as the al Qaeda and anti-government fighters continue to be turned in, dead or alive, the government tolerates the private guns. Al Qaeda is being driven out of the country, and the most effective weapon is not a gun, but angry stares and muttered threats.

Patterico's Challenge

Here is the challenge laid down by Patterico.  It's a pretty easy choice actually.  I dont' hide my admiration of George Bush, but there is this is one thing I don't admire.  He signed the Campaign Finance Reform bill.  This isn't one of those things you can't just chalk up to political horse trading, like the steel tariffs.  This is a move that actually represents a threat to freedom, especially when you have the likes of Pew Charitable Trusts putting their substantial resources into stifling political speech.

So here is my pledge:

If the FEC makes rules that limit my First Amendment right to express my opinion on core political issues, I will not obey those rules.

My hope is we can eventually put enough pressure on Congress to roll back the Campaign Finance Reform laws, and the way we have to do it is keep them in the spotlight.  Ryan Sager's New York Post column is marvelous stroke in putting the pressure on.  But, it's not going to be easy.  Our ruling class, that would be Congress, would prefer that criticism of them be outlawed when election time nears.  They will resist any change that might weaken regulation of political speech, except for their own, of course.

Buying "reform"

Yesterday's New York Post carries a revealing article by Ryan Sager about successful efforts by the left to regulate speech through campaign finance reform.  I reproduce it here in its entirety since Post articles seem to disappear after while.

March 17, 2005 -- CAMPAIGN-FINANCE reform has been an immense scam perpetrated on the American people by a cadre of left-wing foundations and disguised as a "mass movement."

But don't take my word for it. One of the chief scammers, Sean Treglia, a former program officer of the Pew Charitable Trusts, confesses it all in an astonishing videotape I obtained earlier this week.

The tape — of a conference held at USC's Annenberg School for Communication in March of 2004 — shows Treglia expounding to a gathering of academics, experts and journalists (none of whom, apparently, ever wrote about Treglia's remarks) on just how Pew and other left-wing foundations plotted to create a fake grassroots movement to hoodwink Congress.

"I'm going to tell you a story that I've never told any reporter," Treglia says on the tape. "Now that I'm several months away from Pew and we have campaign-finance reform, I can tell this story."

That story in brief:

Charged with promoting campaign-finance reform when he joined Pew in the mid-1990s, Treglia came up with a three-pronged strategy: 1) pursue an expansive agenda through incremental reforms, 2) pay for a handful of "experts" all over the country with foundation money and 3) create fake business, minority and religious groups to pound the table for reform.

"The target audience for all this activity was 535 people in Washington," Treglia says — 100 in the Senate, 435 in the House. "The idea was to create an impression that a mass movement was afoot — that everywhere they looked, in academic institutions, in the business community, in religious groups, in ethnic groups, everywhere, people were talking about reform."

It's a stark admission, but perhaps Treglia should be thanked for his candor.

(Treglia, contacted by The Post yesterday, was singing a different tune about Pew, saying it would be "incorrect to suggest that the organization would attempt to deceive or mislead about its funding efforts." Pew's president, Rebecca Rimel, calls the charge "false" in a written statement.)

Treglia's revelations help put in context a report just out from a group called Political Money Line, "Campaign Finance Lobby: 1994-2004," which follows the money behind campaign-finance reform.

That cash, it turns out, was the one thing about the "movement" that was masssive: From 1994 to 2004, almost $140 million was spent to lobby for changes to our country's campaign-finance laws.

But this money didn't come from little old ladies making do with cat food so they could send a $20 check to Common Cause. The vast majority of this money — $123 million, 88 percent of the total — came from just eight liberal foundations.

These foundations were: the Pew Charitable Trusts ($40.1 million), the Schumann Center for Media and Democracy ($17.6 million), the Carnegie Corporation of New York ($14.1 million), the Joyce Foundation ($13.5 million), George Soros' Open Society Institute ($12.6 million), the Jerome Kohlberg Trust ($11.3 million), the Ford Foundation ($8.8 million) and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation ($5.2 million).

Not exactly all household names, but the left-wing groups that these foundations support may be more familiar: the Earth Action Network, the NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund, People for the American Way, Planned Parenthood, the Public Citizen Foundation, the Feminist Majority Foundation . . .

What did this liberal foundation crowd buy with its $123 million?

Kerry hits the campaign trail

Well, maybe he never left it.  From the LA Times,

Kerry made it clear Thursday that he would escalate his efforts to sharpen the Democratic message and build grass-roots support for the party's House and Senate candidates in 2006. He plans to pursue these goals through a political action committee and a new nonprofit advocacy group.

David Wade, a Kerry spokesman, said the nonprofit organization would attempt to "help Democrats reframe and take on issues," while the political action committee, called Keeping America's Promise, would focus on political organizing.

Kerry said the organizing effort would pattern itself after the 2004 Bush campaign.

"We had … millions of people traveling and … working and doing things," Kerry said of his campaign. "What we didn't have was enough local people in some places who were engaged in that effort. And you don't begin 4 1/2 , five months out. You begin now."

Maybe memory fails me but he didn't wait until "4 1/2, five months out" to start his last campaign.  He was on the trail at least two years out, maybe more.  This time around he hasn't skipped a beat.

Kerry, who has signaled he's considering a second presidential bid in 2008, has been assailing Bush's agenda almost from the moment the president took his hand off the Bible at his second inaugural...

Certain questions are sure to arise when he officially throws his hat in the ring.  For a starter, will the Senator sign his Form 180 to release all military records?  And then there is the inevitable question prompted by this comment.

Kerry said Wolfowitz, whose nomination must be approved by the World Bank board, was "as guilty as [Defense Secretary] Donald Rumsfeld" of major miscalculations about the war in Iraq.

Will the Senator ever pull his head out of his ass?  If ever there were miscalculations about the war in Iraq and its impact on world events, it has been by Kerry and his hard left friends.  He must get his world news from Not in Our Name.

I think another Kerry candidacy would be a joy to behold, but I also think saner minds will prevail.  He won't have MSM on his side, for one thing.  They will not have forgiven him for losing the election after they worked so hard to prop him up.  And in four years MSM may have a slightly different complexion.  Economics may play into it.  People know a liar when they see one, and it's no surprise that CBS News always ranked third in the three way race with ABC and NBC for news ratings when Dan Rather was at the anchor.

Slow news days in Iraq

Roadside and suicide bombings are slowing down in Iraq.  A Google news search has the most recent report of an attack being more than three days ago.  More and more we see that the terrorists are not well regarded in Baghdad.  Strategy Page explains.

IRAQ: Fiction Outsells Non-Fiction

March 17, 2005: Iraqi popular opinion has turned against terrorism in a big way. Apparently the key event was the revelation that Osama bin Laden had appointed Abu Musab al Zarqawi as "Emir" (leader) of al Qaeda efforts in Iraq and commanded him to go forth and kill big-time. But as suicide bombing attacks increasingly failed to reach American targets, and killed Iraqis instead, it appeared that a Saudi (bin Laden) was telling a Jordanian (Zarqawi) to kill Iraqis. This attitude never made headlines, but it slowly spread among Sunni Arab Iraqis over the last year.  Sunni Arab areas where were most of the violence was, particularly after Shia Arab demagogue Moqtada Sadr stopped instigating violence (because he found that he had much less popular support than he believed). Once the Sunni Arabs turned against terrorism, the terrorists found themselves operating in an increasingly hostile environment. 

A big story that the media missed was that American troops operating outside the fortified camps (like the Green Zone) were a lot closer to what was going on than your average reporter (who doesn't get out much because of the danger). The combat troops, and many of the non-combat troops, deal with the danger, and Iraqis, on a daily basis. The troops saw the change in attitude among Iraqis. They also saw, in neighborhood after neighborhood, the sharp decline in attacks on coalition and Iraqi forces. They knew the reason for this was the ongoing reconstruction work (mainly supervised by coalition troops) and terror attacks that killed mostly Iraqis. The foreign media appeared to be describing a place that sort of looked like Iraq, but wasn't. Because of the growing availability of email in Iraq, for Iraqis and foreign troops, more people around the world are able to get unfiltered (by journalists) reports from inside Iraq. This has left recipients of these emails wondering what's going on with the reporters. It's simple; fiction always outsells non-fiction.