Free kibbles

TAX AND SPEND:

Bush warns of dangers of too much government. You can't make this stuff up. Aliens can smell the hypocrisy Mars. You can't help but wonder if Bush is clueless. Or is he just playing conservatives for idiots? More commentary.

GLOBAL WARMING:

Obama postpones Copenhagen climate deal. Thank goodness for the weather. We were so lucky the planet started cooling after 1998. If it had continued warming to even 2001, climate Marxism would be a reality already. We still have a decent chance to kill it before it crushes us.

EDUCATION:

Teachers investigated for selling their services online. God forbid that teachers try to excel in the private sector. They must be regulated into mediocrity in the government sector.

CRIMINAL JUSTICE:

This is how corrupt prosecutors all over America have become.

"In 2006, Assistant U.S. Attorney Brett Grayson lined up more than 30 jailhouse informants to testify that they had sold drugs to Church Point, Louisiana homemaker Ann Colomb and her three sons. (I wrote about the Colomb case in the May 2008 issue of Reason.) Grayson had used some of these snitches before, in the trial of a Houston drug kingpin. After the Houston trial, Grayson was notified that several of his informants had lied, and that there may have been an information sharing network and perjury ring inside the federal prison system. No matter. Grayson used them again. Colomb and her sons were convicted, and spent three months in prison.

The Colombs were eventually freed, with all charges dismissed. Grayson's jailhouse snitches had lied again, and this time, federal judge Tucker Melancon ordered an investigation into new evidence that, somehow, portions of Grayson's case file were being distributed through federal prisons in Texas and Louisiana. The Colombs, meanwhile, spent their life savings on their defense, and were never compensated. According to defense attorneys, Grayson said at one point during the trial that it didn't matter if he personally believed his snitch witnesses, it only mattered what the jury believed, a notion he articulated again in his closing argument."

This is not one bad apple. Because prosecutors have immunity and they win reelection based on convictions, not justice, this is the norm, not the exception. It's nice to see that immunity challenged, but I doubt it will have any effect. Of course we want prosecutors to think twice before entering evidence. Our justice system was founded on the idea that we'd allow ten guilty men to go free before we would convict and innocent man. The arguments made in support of absolute immunity turn that upside down. Why are we concerned about the "chilling" effect of not allowing prosecutors to introduce trumped up evidence instead of the "chilling" affect of allowing prosecutors to knowingly prosecute and convict innocent Americans?

"Katyal made similar statements throughout the hearing: "When someone is introducing evidence at trial, you don't want to chill them in the performance of their duties in any way," and "the overriding interest is protecting the judicial process and not letting information be chilled and not come in." Chief Justice John Roberts underlined that formulation, twice inquiring as to the "chilling" effect of stripping immunity for prosecutors. It took new Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor to make the obvious point: We want prosecutors to "flinch" before introducing evidence they suspect might not be true. In fact, we want them to not introduce that evidence at all. And there should be a chilling effect on misconduct as egregious as coaching witnesses to lie."

Absolutely. Thank you Justice Sotomayor.

WAR:

Fears that Khalid Sheikh Mohammand will turn his civilian trial into a circus to attack Bush administration post 9/11 policies. That's one thing the judge doesn't have to allow. 9/11 era policies came after 9/11.

Military may have missed warning signs about Fort Hood shooter. Gosh, ya think? This essay is just making excuses for the Army. There's no excuse for allowing a jihadist in the military. If we can't get and keep enough psychiatrists without allowing jihadists in the Army, maybe we should stop attacking foreign countries. And this shooter should have never made Major.

"A decade ago, 78.1 percent of captains were promoted to the rank of major. In the past year, that percentage jumped to 94.1 percent."

Should have been at least one fewer.

"[The shooter], for example, won a crucial promotion two years after cautioning colleagues at Walter Reed Army Medical Center that Muslims needed leeway to leave the Army as conscientious objectors to “decrease adverse events.” He reportedly said that the Koran took precedence over the U.S. Constitution.
...
Months before [the shooter] pinned on the golden oak leaves of an Army major, he exchanged e-mails with a radical Islamic cleric in Yemen who knew three of the 9/11 hijackers and once presided over a mosque in Falls Church, Va., attended by [the shooter]."

This entire essay is just more evidence of catastrophic institutional failure that prioritized the wrong things, like numbers, over identifying enemy guerrilla fighters in their midst.

Reason on how foolishly banning guns at Ford Hood enabled the shooter to kill and wound so many people.

Reason spends a lot of time saying the Army shouldn't have done anything different to stop the Fort Hood shooter, but in the middle of the essay the author tosses out this sentence:

"Obviously, a soldier who expresses a radical anti-American ideology demands intervention."

Hello? Don't you realize that sentence is the important part of this essay and the rest is a straw man? That's what the Army should have done different. This guy wasn't just a Muslim. He was a radical Muslim who supported jihad. The Army knew it. The FBI knew it. He should have been stopped.

Cato's box score on Iraq:

"When the Bush administration started its misguided adventure in Iraq, the president and his Neocon chorus presumed that the U.S. would be acquiring a loyal, even obseqious ally. With the American-subsidized bank embezzler Ahmed Chalabi in charge, Baghdad would create a Western-style democracy, enshrine women’s rights, recognize Israel, provide the U.S. with permanent military bases, and offer a new market for American businesses.

Alas, we’ve struck out: zero for five. Although America’s uber-hawks bridled at reference to our “occupation” of Iraq, Iraqis had no hesitation in using the word and surprised the Bushies by demanding a deadline for the withdrawal of American forces. And Iraqi opposition to the U.S. occupation has affected their attitude toward Americans in other areas."

That sums it up.

FOREIGN POLICY:

If Obama would spend just a fraction of the time implementing sanctions against Iran as he does talking about them, Iran might already have stopped its nuclear program. Just kidding. It's far too late for sanctions to work. They're too close to give up now.

MEDIA:

This guy gets Glenn Beck to a T. Beck's staff indisputably does the best investigation journalism of the Obama administration and agenda of any major media outlet in America, but his extreme manipulation and exploitation of his audience's emotions borders on the grotesque. It's putridly phony. It's staged. It's self-aggrandizing. It's irresponsible. And it's a shame. He has so much good information to share, but he can't be taken seriously because of his shameful manipulation of his audience just so he can get people to worship him and make more money.

"He is constantly urging his viewers to connect the dots and look at the big picture, even when the picture exists only in his head. He is forever advising them to consider stories not as transient, random, isolated phenomena, as most newscasts do, but as parts of a larger, ongoing narrative that grows more and more meaningful (and menacing) the longer you study it."

The frightful picture of the Obama-Democrat agenda is not just in Beck's head.

MISC:

Brazilian hacking teams fail to hack into voting machines. Brazil needs better hackers. There's no such thing as a system that couldn't be hacked (but adding a physical barrier makes it a lot harder.)

Alternate version of Star Trek pilot released.

Yet another study shows how modern chemicals are feminizing boys. Unfortunately, since our society is dominated by feminist values, this isn't considered a problem. I hope the pendulum swings back toward balance before chemistry makes it impossible.

Real ID doesn't make us safer.

Insight into the FISA debate.

Will everyone please stop freaking out of Ayn Rand? Thank you. She's suddenly everywhere, and I imagine overexposure will be bad for her. Trying to read one of her books is like being repeatedly hit over the head with it or listening to an interminable speech by a combination of the Pope and Stalin. It always surprised me that such a champion of freedom and atheism came off so rigid, dogmatic and repetitive. Fortunately I understood freedom long before I'd ever heard of her, so I never felt obligated to finish one of her books. Love her ideas. Can't stand her fiction.