Best Interests of the Child

A 14-year-old is old enough to know what is in her best interests. It's ridiculous to try to tear her from her adoptive family. Why they're trying to obtain legal custody, when the girl is old enough to have a relationship with regardless of custody, is beyond reason.

Twins Reunited After 14 Years
ABC News

14 years of her life, Andrea Penaherrera never knew she had a sister.

But on one day four months ago in the southern Ecuadorean town of Milagros, she and her mother were shocked to walk into a restaurant and see across the room another face that looked just like Andrea's.

The girls had the same hair, eyes and were identical in every way.

It didn't take long for Andrea and the other girl, Marielisa, to realize that they were twins, separated at birth.

Across the globe, the discovery generated headlines, in part for how the two girls met. But, there was another twist -- the alleged story of how the two were separated in the first place.

The girls' biological mother, Petita Penaherrera, said doctors never told her she had twins.

More beaurocratic garbage

More bureaucratic nonsense is keeping Iraqi translators who helped American troops from coming to the United States. Faced with threats of rape, torture, and death, many of the brave Iraqi's who worked alongside American troops in Iraq to escape to the United States. Whatever we can do to help these people out, we need to do. If these individuals were able to help doing translating work for the American soldiers and marines in Iraq, perhaps they can help out with translation work for the United States government here. After all, we can definitely use it.

Allies Left Behind? Iraqis Who Helped U.S. Feel 'Betrayed,' Marked for Death
ABC News

Kirk Johnson is the keeper of what he calls the saddest list in the world -- a list of Iraqis who worked for the United States but are now marked for death and on the run.

Johnson says that the U.S. effort in Iraq "would not have functioned without these people. And they risk their lives every single day to come through checkpoints that are routinely mortared and shelled and hit by suicide bombers and snipers just to come and help us -- because they believe in America enough to help us rebuild their country."

Many of these Iraqis fled their country after they got letters that describe them as "enemies of God," as well as blunt threats: "We will cut off your heads."

All are now desperate to come to the United States, and Kirk Johnson is the man they are turning to.

"This is urgent," he says. "This isn't, 'Let's have a meeting once a month to figure out how we are going to address the issue.' This is, 'Let's get them on a plane to save them because they need our help now.'"

Anti-nuclear protestors

The earthquake in Japan is bound to renew calls for bans of peaceful nuclear energy production, despite the fact that no one in Western Europe, no one in the United States, and no one Japan has ever has ever died as a result of nuclear energy production while coal-fired power plants have killed tens of thousands due to asthma and other breathing-related illnesses.

Nuke Waste Drums Tipped in Japan Quake
ABC News

A powerful earthquake tipped over barrels of nuclear waste at a power plant and officials on Tuesday were investigating whether there were any radioactive levels a day after they said the quake had caused the reactor to spill radioactive water into the sea.

The death toll stood at nine a day after the 6.6-magnitude quake. One person was missing and another 13,000 were homeless, as rescue workers rushed to locate any survivors in the rubble amid fears of landslides.

The quake had caused a leak of water with radioactive material Monday at the Kashiwazaki Kariwa nuclear power plant, the world's largest in terms of electricity output, although officials said that leak caused no harm to the environment.

Brave New World

Apparently an Army Captain is trying to sell a plan for ending the war in Iraq via e-bay.

What bothers me about this:

1) If the captain offering this report for sale was really, truly interested in solving the conflict then why wouldn't he just e-mail it directly to every senator, every congressman, the heads of the Joint Chiefs, the Security of Defense, the President the Vice-President, every news organization, bloggers, and any political action committee he could come up with?

2) It strikes me as improper for anyone to personally enrich himself with materials he developed as part of the normal course of doing his job, particularly when it's someone in the military.

Desperation or just wishful thinking?

Newsweek's Anna Quindlen makes a desperate plea for Hillary to convince Sen. Barack Obama to be her running mate. Desperate, there, being the operative word. Still 16 months from the election, isn't it a bit early for anyone to be talking about running mates? Isn't it a little early for anyone to suggest that Obama's aims for the Presidency this time around are a lost cause? Also, let's be honest here - Obama's chances of winning the Presidency as a candidate on his own are much higher than his chances of winning the Vice Presidency along side a candidate that more than half the voting public dislikes.

Quote of the Day

"It's not reason that is at the heart of modern-day liberalism but rather the claim to superior virtue and, even more important, to a special knowledge unavailable to the unwashed or unenlightened."

- Fred Siegel, Professor of History at The Cooper Union, writing about "Camelot and the Cultural Revolution"

Feeding the Hungry

There's no reason that the developed world can't feed the world's hungry. With the United Nations worrying about being able to continue their programs, the $600 million a year the World Food Program pays out is a pittance when compared to the amount of money the United States alone pays to farm subsidies - price supports which interfere with the ability of the Third World to make a living off of agriculture. Elimination of these subsidies, which nearly universally go towards large corporations and not small, family farms, will enable Third World farmers to make a more livable wage and increase food production at the point of need. In addition, the billions the United States spends on farm subsidies could instead be used to feed the hungry, both here in the United States and abroad, particularly in Africa, Eastern Europe, and India.

Right Problem, Wrong Solution

Barack Obama is correctly and properly drawing attention to, as he accurately describes it, the "epidemic of violence that's sickening the soul of this nation. The violence is unacceptable and it's got to stop."

His policies for correcting this problem, are focusing in the wrong direction. In addition to a goal of expanded after school activities and a harsh crack-down on the very small minority of licensed gun vendors who violate the law in selling weapons - worthy aims, both - he directs his major legislative endeavor towards the predictable drivel, the now lapsed assault weapons bad. That's apparently pretty much it.

Now, the assault weapons ban had very little to do with keeping any particular weapon off of the streets. Fully automatic weapons, what most individuals would consider an assault weapon, remain illegal for civilian ownership. Armor defeating, tracer, and explosive ammunition are illegal. The entire push of the ban was to target weapons that looked a certain way. The ban made a determination of what an assault weapon was based on purely cosmetic features - a pistol grip versus a rifle grip; internal versus external magazine, etc. - and banned weapons that certain way. The obvious result? Weapons changed their appearance, previously manufactured were still sold, and nothing of substance changed to the criminals who were buying and selling stolen or illegally imported weapons anyway.

Obama is trying to take a very complex and very serious problem and boil it down to a couple of quick little sound-bites. Violent crime in our country, particularly murder, is much too high. A couple of quick little legislative fixes - adding a little more money to programs and banning some guns - isn't going to have much effect on the problem. Fighting crime must be a large-scale, broadly focused endeavor encompassing a wide variety of tactics including:

1) More and better trained police,

2) Longer prison sentences for violent offenders, including automatic
life sentences for murder and child rape,

3) improved economic conditions,

4) Keeping kids in school through graduation,

5) Providing mentors and role models to help direct kids lives away from drugs and crime.Obama again correctly points out that many of the problems are due to a lack of direction in the lives of the young men committing so many of these crimes. As they grow up, they are lacking the mentors and the role models to show them the better, proper way through life. What he doesn't do, however, is lead people toward a better path. Just saying that parents and neighbors need to do more to help out isn't enough. He should be proposing ways in which they can help and proposing policies to encourage and foster that help which is so critical.

Instead, once again, we're getting the usual Liberal Elite combination of a political slam against a punching bag industry combined with hot air and no real solutions.

$500 billion hurricane strike?

Yesterday's Houston Chronicle spoke at length about Hurricane Katrina, detailing how in studies that its devastation was not unrivaled. In it, they state that, "a $500 billion storm in a major metropolitan area along the U.S. coast, such as Miami or possibly even Houston, is conceivable by 2020.

The idea that a $500 billion hurricane hit is "conceivable" is the next 13 years is ridiculous. Katrina was an event that is expected about once every 250 years. A $275 billion dollar event is one which is expected about every 1,000 years. A $500 billion hurricane hit is so unlikely that the data doesn't go that far. The chance of a $275 billion dollar hurricane occurring in the next 13 years is about 1.3%. Remember, these are exponential numbers so as the dollar value increases, the amount the chance is lessening increases - so, a $50 billion event is not 1/2 as likely as a $25 billion event, but rather 35% as likely as a $25 billion event. What does that mean?

It means that the chance that a $500 billion hurricane hitting by 2020 is just above nil.

Is "just above nil" really the same as "conceivable"?

Quote of the Day

"The increasing concern among Iraqi political leaders that the U.S. may not have a long-term commitment to Iraq has served in recent months to reinforce hedging behaviors and made the hardest political bargains even more difficult."

- Iraq progress report referring to the reason for difficulties reaching the goals set out

More help for Darfur...

Relief workers in Darfur are having problems with delivering food aid. Apparently, one-sixth of all aid deliveries are hijacked. The United Nations is aiming to send in troops some time next year. I don't see how 27,000 total troops (20,000 new and 7,000 existing) will be enough. One-third of the population has been displaced, two-thirds need food aid. The situation there is mind-blowingly bad. Whatever needs to be done, has to be done and waiting for the United Nations to get around to sending in troops next year is not acceptable. Piracy of humanitarian aid should not be tolerated and the fact that everyone is acting as though this is business as usual while people are dying is demoralizing, to say the least.

Why the blind rush?

Lately, there's been such a hurry to try to drum up legislative support for a precipitous withdrawal from Iraq, regardless of the civilian causalities that would result, in advance of both the July and September progress reports on Iraq that one starts to wonder why. Why, for instance, is Hillary Clinton joining with the only Klansman in Congress to write an editorial saying that it is time to turn our backs and condemn the Iraqi people to what she describes as a "civil war," a stark difference to how the vast majority of Iraqis view the struggle. Michigan Senator Carl Levin - the same one who buckled so meekly in the face of his Democratic colleagues when they steamrolled through an amendment increasing CAFE standards - expects today to propose an amendment to bring the troops home.

What makes all of this so strange is that it is coming in advance of tomorrow's Pentagon report on how the surge is going. Why are they so excited to push ahead with their rhetoric before getting all of the information?

Hillary notes that the Pentagon says that the "overall level of violence in Iraq hasn't lessened." Well, that's obvious. The United States just sent in 30,000 more soldiers and began a major offensive. Of course the overall level of violence in Iraq hasn't lessened. The U.S. is out actively hunting down terrorists, actively securing civilian areas, and actively clearing sections of the most violent cities (Baghdad and Ramadi) in an effort to provide long-term stability. Al-Qaeda has reacted by trying to increase the level of violence aimed at American troops, hoping to scare the country into surrender. What is startling, however, is that despite 30,000 more troops and despite a major offensive by the Americans and by Al-Qaeda, there hasn't been an increase in the overall level of violence, as any reasonable assessment of the situation would expect. Why not? Because as the U.S. and Iraqi Iraqi forces clear areas, they become more peaceful. The increase in troop levels and in intensity is being matched by a decrease in violence in many areas, particularly Ramadi.

From The New York Times on Sunday:

Until only a few months ago, the Central Street bazaar was enemy territory, watched over by American machine-gunners in sandbagged bunkers on the roof of the governor's building across the road. Ramadi was Iraq's most dangerous city, and the area around the building the most deadly place in Ramadi. Now, a pact between local tribal sheiks and American commanders has sent thousands of young Iraqis from Anbar Province into the fight against extremists linked to Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia. The deal has all but ended the fighting in Ramadi and recast the city as a symbol of hope that the tide of the war may yet be reversed to favor the Americans and their Iraqi allies.

---

The key to turning that around was the shift in allegiance by tribal sheiks. But the sheiks turned only after a prolonged offensive by American and Iraqi forces, starting in November, that put Al Qaeda groups on the run, in Ramadi and elsewhere across western Anbar.

Not for the first time, the Americans learned the basic lesson of warfare here: that Iraqis, bludgeoned for 24 years by Saddam Hussein's terror, are wary of rising against any force, however, brutal, until it is in retreat. In Anbar, Sunni extremists were the dominant force, with near-total popular support or acquiescence, until the offensive broke their power.

Tomorrow's Pentagon report is going to show three things:

1) The Iraqi government has failed to meet even one of the
benchmarks we want.

2) Sections of Baghdad are featuring intense fighting, while other
previously dangerous areas are safer.

3) Anbar province is an unquestioned, rousing victory and violence
there has been greatly diminished.

What will this mean? The troop surge has worked in Anbar and has shown some results in Baghdad, even while other areas of the capital are featuring more frequent and intense fighting. Is the surge an unmitigated success? No. Is it an unmitigated failure? Absolutely not We've seen some success, which is something that should be grasped onto dearly as we attempt to replicate it in Baghdad.

The only way to know for sure, however, is to wait for the report tomorrow and not blindly rush into attempts at swaying public perception or push through legislation before even the small amount of information available tomorrow comes out, let alone when the final report is complete in September. Why the blind, mad rush to pull the troops out now, before the report on the surge is complete? Could it be that they are afraid that the good news in the report will weaken their goal to deliver a political defeat to the President?

Polls show nation is uninformed

USA Today addressed a recently released Gallup poll in an article published today. The most striking item is the idea that 60% of adults interviewed believe that the economy is worse now than it was five years ago. Five years ago, we were in a recession and had a significantly higher national unemployment rate. In the intervening years, the economy has been growing, stocks are rising, and jobs are being created. The odd thing, though, is that the population as a whole have been stuck with the false perception, despite five years of very good economic news, that things are going poorly. Sure, there are problems in Michigan, but the vast majority of the nation is doing very, very well. Where does the public get this perspective? Could it be from the media, who publishes polls about people's opinions of the economy instead of economic data and who feature negative reports over positive ones?

Dingell committs to sell-out Michigan

A showdown between Dingell and Pelosi over CAFE is in the works. However, if Dingell is Michigan's best chance at avoiding CAFE increases, we might want to find a new champion. He's committed to raising to CAFE standards - despite the exorbitant cost, the lost of Michigan jobs, the crippling of the American auto industry, the evidence that prior CAFE increases have done nothing to reduce fuel consumption, and, most importantly, that the same CO2 reductions can be gained by improvements in the areas which produce vastly more CO2 and where we haven't had 30 years of concerted efforts at improved efficiency (namely agriculture and power generation).

Frankly, I do not understand why the UAW still supports the Democrats when the union's best interests no longer line up with the Democratic agenda. In exchange for a promise to ban secret ballot union voting, the Democrats are trying to shove down CAFE increases and bring in tens of millions of low wage manual workers to drive down UAW wages. UAW members are going to realize, and very soon, that their union is more concerned about advancing liberal agendas and protecting their privilege and power among liberal elites than they are about protecting the jobs and wages of UAW members.

Quote of the Day

"I have made it very clear that I intend to see to it that CAFE is increased."

- John Dingell, Democratic Representative from Dearborn, Michigan as he sells out Michigan to the powers in Washington.

Pussyfoot - v. To act timidly to avoid committing oneself...

According to The Daily Express, Gordon Brown is going to ban the terms "Muslim terrorist" and "war on terror". Is it too much to point out that the terrorists are Muslims and that their perverted view of the Muslim faith is what is spurring them to engage in terrorism?

While Patrick Mercer absolutely is correct when he says that, “the vast majority of Muslims are not involved in terrorism” that does not make this “quite a smart idea.” The vast majority of terrorists are radical Muslims. I don’t seem to recall the Brits being concerned at referring to the IRA terrorists as Catholic or, for that matter, Irish. Sure, there are different terrorists in the world and some are not motivated by perverted misconceptions of the Muslim faith but by de-emphasizing the religious nature of these terrorists we are losing something important from the discussion.

If the good and decent Muslims in the world, who do indeed make up the vast majority of Muslims, are concerned with the connections between their faith and terrorists, they should be upset with the terrorists who are stridently making those connections and not the Kafir who are pointing out that groups called the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas), Islamic Jihad, or the Party of God (Hezbollah) are the ones who are connecting Islam to terrorism.

By ignoring the fact that the driving principal of these groups is to violently promote their depraved hijacking of a noble religion, we are making it more difficult to win this war. We do need, as Gordon Brown implies, better relations with Muslims throughout the world. The way to do that is not by ignoring the religious nature of the terrorists but by pointing out that we understand that these repugnant distortions of Islam are as much a threat to true Islam as they are to the Western world.

What a troop pull-out means..

From the BBC News:

Iraq fears Turkey troop build-up

Iraq says Turkey has 140,000 soldiers along its border, prompting fears of an incursion against Kurdish guerillas.

Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshiyar Zebari, an ethnic Kurd himself, said his government was against any breach of Iraqi sovereignty.

He called for talks with Ankora to solve the issue.

Turkey accuses Kurdish separatists of staging attacks from inside Iraq. It has often warned Baghdad that it is prepared to take military action.

While this is a potential problem, Turkey is unlikely to do anything really serious as long as the U.S. and the U.K. are in-country. The potential for concern occurs if there is a precipitous troop withdrawal. The Kurds are likely to see that as an opportunity to declare an independent nation and would want Turkish Kurdistan included with Iraqi Kurdistan. Just another example of how "troops home now" really means "bigger middle east war."

Quote of the Day

Jack Shafer, writing in the Slate article Green is the New Yellow:

Often as sensationalistic as its yellow predecessor, green journalism tends to appeal to our emotions, exploit our fears, and pander to our vanity. It places a political agenda in front of the quest for journalistic truth and in its most demagogic forms tolerates no criticism, branding all who question it as enemies of the people.

Quote of the Day

"The New York Times is for withdrawal of U.S. troops from most of Iraq, except maybe the Kurdish north. Even the promising Anbar-type initiatives - which seem to require an aggressive U.S. military presence - are apparently to be abandoned. The Times admits the results of the withdrawal will 'most likely' be chaos, including 'further ethnic cleansing, even genocide.' But it still prefers withdrawal. Jules Crittenden finds this morally curious, and so do I. ...I could be convinced that withdrawal is justified because the ensuing burst of sectarian killing will be short, followed by relative stability - preferable, in the long run, to continued occupation. I could be convinced we should abandon the goal of a unitary Iraqi state and focus on some sort of engineered partition. I hope I couldn't be convinced that we should abandon Iraqis to 'genocide' just because the resulting deaths can be blamed on Bush.

- Mickey Kaus in Kausfiles on Slate.com, July 8th, 2007 (ellipsis in original)

Hybrids not delivering as promised...

One of the current administration's many items of progress on environmental issues has been an Executive Order to the EPA to revise their methods of testing fuel economy. The new methods concentrate on real-world driving, not optimal driving conditions as in the prior methods. Aggressive driving, use of air conditioning, heavily laden trunks, low tire pressure, dirty air filters, etc., will lower fuel economy dramatically. This decrease, it turns out, is even more pronounced in hybrids.

This brings us to John True who is suing Honda over the Civic Hybrid's advertised mileage. Mr. True bought a Civic Hybrid, paying more than $7,000 extra, in order to save gas. The advertised mileage, based on the flawed EPA estimates, was 49 city, 51 highway. His experience - 32 miles per gallon. Now, my stick-shift, 4 cylinder 1999 Saturn SC-1 gets around 30-31 mpg as I drive rather conservatively and rarely use my air conditioning.

Perhaps Mr. True's experiences aren't quite valid. Perhaps the Civic Hybrid will test out at about 40 mpg, splitting the difference between it's advertised 50 and its empirical 30. And, this is already a small car. What does this mean about the bigger hybrids? What does this say about the Senate's proposed CAFE increases? It says that 35 mpg is a lot further off than we expect and hybrids, even at about $7,000 a car, are not likely to bridge that gap.

When $120 million just isn't enough...

If public schools can't run a classroom of 28 on $300,000 a year, perhaps we need to wonder if they have the competence to do the job. From The Detroit Free Press on June 30:

Teachers told: You plug in, you pay up

Got a desk clock in your office? How about a small fan, a little extra light, or even a mini-fridge?

Plugging in those personal amenities at work will cost teachers and employees money in a small, but growing, number of school districts. By making employees who bring in fans, space heaters, and other small devices pay a fee to offset the electricity those appliances use, district administrators think they have a promising new way to help control costs after years of budget cuts. Grosse Point Public Schools initiated a "pay to plug" measure last spring, and Chippewa Valley Public Schools is considering doing the same for this fall.

"We don't want to cut services for kids or families," said Chippwea Valley spokeswoman Diane Blain. "Pay to plug is just asking employees to step up and help us. Whether or not it will be implemented still remains to be seen."

"Salesperson for the State"

How can Jennifer Granholm say she's "a really good salesperson for the state" when she's failed so grievously to sell the state even to companies who are here? Ooohh, Google added a few hundred high-turnover commission-based salespeople here in Michigan. That will go a long way to offset Kmart, Dow, and Comerica moving out thousands of high pay salaried positions.

She seems to be basing her image on this whole "salesperson for the state" idea, which is garbage because she's done such a horrible job of selling the state. From The Detroit Free Press on June 30:

Governor to head overseas

With a new, more business-friendly tax awaiting her signature, Gov. Jennifer Granholm said Friday that she'll soon travel overseas to sell Michigan as a good place to do business.

She said an August trade mission to undisclosed countries will showcase the state, especially renewable energy industries that she says can help fuel Michigan's economic recovery.

"I'm a really good salesperson for this state," Granholm told the Free Press. She's led past trade missions to Germany and Japan.

Granholm also called on lawmakers to voluntarily return 5% of their salaries -- like she does -- as a good-faith gesture to resolve the state's budget crisis. Salaries for the governor ($177,000 annually) and lawmakers ($79,650) are set every two years by an independent commission and cannot be changed by the Legislature.

Hang on there..."sanctity of life"?

Drew Lane on Drew and Mike (the morning show on WRIF) just derided the phrase "sanctity of life" in reference to some people being disturbed at destroying embryos in order to engage in embryonic stem cell research, saying that it was hypocritical to say one is concerned about the "sanctity of life" while being pro-capital punishment.

Assuming that one believes that an embryo is an actual human (a holding which is the essence of the pro-life view) - he's saying that it is hypocritical for someone to say that it is wrong to benefit from the intentional death of an innocent child (which is what the pro-life crowd views an embryo to be) but it's okay for someone who has committed the most heinous crimes to be put to death? How is it hypocritical for someone to say that when individuals commit the most heinous of crimes they deserve the death penalty but it is immoral to murder what one considers an innocent child?

Illegals Pay Taxes?

Here's a question - if you're an illegal immigrant, how are you paying taxes? If you are illegal, you don't have a social security number. Perhaps I don't quite understand how taxes get paid, but the last time I checked you need a social security number for social security, income, and property taxes. Since illegals have no social security number, we are left with one of two situations:

1) They are not paying taxes, or

2) They are committing fraud.

Personally, I'm not sure that the illegal immigrant advocacy groups should be advertising the idea that massive numbers of illegal immigrants are committing fraud and identity theft by paying taxes.

Quote of the Day

From Mickey Kaus, whose Kausfiles blog has turned into a 24-hour, 7 day a week, anti-Comprehensive Immigration blog. Bold italics mine:

Reminder -- Comprehensive Dissembling: Tim Russert mis-summarized the provisions of the immigration bill at the beginning of his show on Sunday -- and not on a trivial issue. He said the Z-visa legalization plan was 'contingent on increased boarder security' measures. But the 'probationary' Z-visa is available immediately -- no waiting for 'increased border security.' And the 'probationary' Z-visa is what legalizes former illegals, allowing them to work and travel in the U.S...I guess these are the sort of complex nuances that can only be communicated on talk radio!...