Chris At Home

• Fox news crew expected to be released earlier, still captive. And they were forced to convert to Islam.
  

  They were shown separately sitting cross-legged, reading a statement which Fox said was an announcement that they had converted to Islam. At times in the video they were wearing long Muslim robes.
  
  Wiig called on leaders of the West to stop "hiding behind the 'I don't negotiate with terrorists' myth." He then read some words in Arabic.
  
  "The issue of the two kidnapped journalists is on the way to being resolved," Seyam told Reuters. "Efforts are under way with several parties to secure their release within the coming hours."

  
  Update: Good news: they have been released.
  

  The two Fox News journalists kidnapped in the Gaza Strip on Aug. 14 were released Sunday afternoon.

  
  
• Israel returns media attacks Israel accidently strikes reporter's SUV. The fact that a Reuters reporter was inside was conincidental.
  

  Israeli aircraft fired two missiles early Sunday at an armored car belonging to the Reuters news agency, wounding five people, including two cameramen, Palestinian witnesses and hospital officials said.
  
  The Israeli army said it did not realize the car's passengers were journalists and only attacked because the vehicle was driving in a suspicious manner near Israeli troops in the middle of a combat zone.

  
  
• Egypt says Israel is negotiating a prisoner swap. They could have had that deal without the defeat in Lebanon.
  

  The Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram said Sunday morning that according to high-ranking Egyptian sources, an exchange deal is set to take place between Israel and Hizbullah within the next two or three weeks, Israel Radio reported.
  
  The first stage of the agreement would be the release of the two soldiers kidnapped by Hizbullah last month, Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev, the report said.
  
  The next stage, the sources said, would be Israel's release of Palestinian prisoners a day or two after the soldiers are returned.

  
  
• A rather bad editorial in the JPost argues that American Jews might drop support for Israel because the Israeli image as a winner has been tarnished, Americans don't like losers. I think it is a wrong-headed opinion.
  

  Americans like victims, but they don't tend to have much affection for losers. Even more to the point, as much as it is a truism that Israeli triumphs have boasted the self-esteem of Diaspora Jews, be they Zionist or non-Zionist (think of the impact of the Six-Day War on the birth of the Soviet Jewry movement, both in Russia and the United States), so, too, have public-relations debacles for Israel diminished Jewish support.
  
  While some of us react to the notion of Israel as the bad guy - be it as winner or loser - with anger and resentment, others respond by internalizing the criticism and wrongly turning our anger on the Israelis rather than their critics. If there has been any group in the United States among whom support for Israel has diminished during the course of more than two decades of media Israel-bashing, it is the Jews - not our non-Jewish neighbors.
  
  Seen in this light, defeat is not likely to increase the quotient of Diaspora identification with Israe

  
  
• Head to Iraq, it is good for your lifespan:
  

  Between March 21, 2003, when the first military death was recorded in Iraq, and March 31, 2006, there were 2,321 deaths among American troops in Iraq. Seventy-nine percent were a result of action by hostile forces. Troops spent a total of 592,002 "person-years" in Iraq during this period. The ratio of deaths to person-years, .00392, or 3.92 deaths per 1,000 person-years, is the death rate of military personnel in Iraq.
  
  How does this rate compare with that in other groups? One meaningful comparison is to the civilian population of the United States. That rate was 8.42 per 1,000 in 2003, more than twice that for military personnel in Iraq.

  
  After allowing for age and gender, the death rate in the US is lower, of course. However, black military-age males in Philadelphia do have a higher death rate than soldiers in Iraq. Philly is a quagmire! Get the black guys out!
  

  Nevertheless, all attempts we have made to reconcile the two systems reach the same conclusion: Hispanics have a death risk about 20 percent higher than non-Hispanics, and blacks have a death risk about 30 to 40 percent lower than that of non-blacks.

  
  
• A serious load of BS from Iran: Nasr-Allah is the Victory of Allah...Nasrallah is the leader of Hezbullah, as forecast in the Koran. Except it is not in the Koran. Isn't it a beheading offense to fake quotes in Islam?
  
  
• Krauthammer explains all. I think he is right.
  

  Realistically speaking, the point of this multilateral exercise cannot be to stop Iran's nuclear program by diplomacy. That has always been a fantasy. It will take military means. There would be terrible consequences from an attack. These must be weighed against the terrible consequences of allowing an openly apocalyptic Iranian leadership to acquire weapons of genocide.
  
  The point of the current elaborate exercise in multilateral diplomacy is to slightly alter that future calculation. By demonstrating extraordinary forbearance and accommodation, perhaps we will have purchased the acquiescence of our closest allies -- Britain, Germany and, yes, France -- to a military strike on that fateful day when diplomacy has run its course.

  
  
• Destroying the myth of a peaceful Iranian nuclear program:
  

  Iran does not have any working nuclear power plant and thus has no immediate need of enriched uranium even as fuel. The only Iranian nuclear power plant under construction in Hellieh on the Bushehr Peninsula is not scheduled to come on stream before next spring. And, when it does, it will have enough fuel for the first 10 years of its operation. Russia, which is building the station, has offered to provide all the needed fuel for its entire lifespan of 37 years.
  
  To sum up: Iran does not need any enriched uranium at least until next March. After next March, it would still need not produce any enriched uranium until the year 2017. Even after 2017, Iran would still have no need of domestic uranium enrichment for the Hellieh plant until 2044.
  
  Iran's plutonium project is even more interesting. Not only does the country not have any heavy water power plants that might need plutonium, it has no plans to build any either. In other words, Iran is spending cast sums of money on a project for which it has no obvious use. Unless, of course, the plutonium in question, as the enriched uranium discussed above, is meant for purposes other than producing electricity.

  
  
• Some think Iran is working on a megaton hydrogen bomb.
  
  
• UN won't stop the re-arming of Hezbullah. So much for Resolution 1701....
  

  United Nations peacekeepers will not be stationed along the Lebanese-Syrian border to prevent arms smuggling to Hezbollah except at Beirut's request, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan said Friday during the press conference at which the European Union announced it would contribute around 7,000 soldiers to the multinational force in South Lebanon.
  
  According to Annan, Resolution 1701 does not require deploying the UN force to the border, unless the Lebanese government explicitly requests its help. Lebanon's interior minister declared yesterday that the Lebanese Army alone would patrol the border, but it could accept "technical assistance from UNIFIL."
  
  Annan's announcement followed Syrian threats last week that it would view UN troop deployment as "a hostile act" and seal the border with Lebanon, which is likely to have grave economic consequences for Lebanon. Israel continues to demand UNIFIL's deployment along the border, to cut off arms shipments from Syria and Iran to Hezbollah. A Foreign Ministry spokesman in Jerusalem said yesterday that Israel would not lift the air blockade on Lebanon unless UNIFIL troops were deployed to monitor its borders.

  
  
• Gazans are nuts:
  

  In May, a 59-year-old man suffering from heart failure was brought into the Khan Yunis hospital’s emergency room. When informed of the man’s death, his family “went crazy and trashed the emergency room…. Anyone wearing a white coat was beaten,” said Dr. Nasser Azaar, the emergency room director.
  Three months later, Azaar remains shocked by the fact that several local doctors related to the man participated in the frenzied destruction.

  
  Read other examples.
  
  
• UNIFIL spies for Hezbullah:
  

  UNIFIL--the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon, a nearly 2,000-man blue-helmet contingent that has been present on the Lebanon-Israel border since 1978--is officially neutral. Yet, throughout the recent war, it posted on its website for all to see precise information about the movements of Israeli Defense Forces soldiers and the nature of their weaponry and materiel, even specifying the placement of IDF safety structures within hours of their construction. New information was sometimes only 30 minutes old when it was posted, and never more than 24 hours old.
  
  Meanwhile, UNIFIL posted not a single item of specific intelligence regarding Hezbollah forces. Statements on the order of Hezbollah "fired rockets in large numbers from various locations" and Hezbollah's rockets "were fired in significantly larger numbers from various locations" are as precise as its coverage of the other side ever got.

  
  
• Fascism and loss of freedom....in Belgium.
  

  Take Belgian Socialists, Flemish or Walloon. The hallmark of nearly every European socialist party has long been hostility to religion. In recent years, Belgium's ruling Socialist-Liberal coalition has antagonized Catholics by legalizing gay marriage and euthanasia, banning crucifixes from government buildings, and abolishing the traditional Te Deum service previously held by the government to commemorate the inauguration of Leopold I, first king of the Belgians.
  
  But then the Socialists began taking note of Belgium's Muslim community, some 500,000 strong. In Brussels, notes Joël Rubinfeld of the Atlantis Institute think tank, half of the Socialist Party's 26-member slate in the city's 75-seat parliament is Muslim. In the commune of Molenbeek, longstanding Socialist mayor Philippe Moureaux has made halal meals standard in all schools; police officers are also barred from eating or drinking on the streets during Ramadan. The Socialist Party was also, improbably, the leading opponent of a bill that would have criminalized the denial of the Armenian genocide. This, too, is a product of burgeoning Muslim-Socialist alliance, as is the party's routine denunciations of Israel.

  
  
• What the Senate would look like if the Dems win control in 2006. It ain't pretty.
  

  Alcee finally appears in paragraph sixteen:
  
  

  Other positions are more problematic. At the Intelligence Committee, Representative Alcee L. Hastings of Florida, who was removed from the federal bench in the 1980’s, is in line to take over, although that decision would be the responsibility of Ms. Pelosi and could prove explosive.

  
  "Removed from the federal bench"? He was impeached by the House for corruption and perjury and "became only the sixth Judge in the history of impeachment in the United States to be removed from office by the United States Senate." However, the good people of the great state of Florida have sent him to Washington, so here we are.

  
  Corruption, perjury, Chairman of the Intelligence Committee. Any question on who you should vote for?
  
  
• An interesting article which describes the media as the real Democratic party, or at least a 527 interest group which provides support for Democrats.
  

  The first ground truth is that the liberal media, not the Democrats, are the party standing in opposition to the Republicans. The Democrats ran out of ideas the night Bobby Kennedy died, and since then the media have become the primary source of Democrat ideas and policy.
  
  The second truth is that the media are more than just the Dems' think tank. In fact, some of the biggest media outlets are the source of thinly veiled attack ads aimed at your candidates just like the so-called "527 Groups," those huge soft-money peddlers supposedly independent of the candidates they support. Think of what George Soros could do if he had a global news network that could produce multi-million dollar attack ads every day, and then you'll know what some mainstream media outlets have become. Rightly or wrongly, given their history with CBS, ABC, NBC, the New York Times, the Washington Post and lately, AP, some conservatives classify them among the worst offenders.
  ...
  Americans knew they'd heard something important last year when Washington Post editor Marie Arana said, "The elephant in the newsroom is our narrowness ... If you work here, you must be one of us. You must be liberal, progressive, a Democrat. I've been in communal gatherings at the Post, watching election returns, and have been flabbergasted to see my colleagues cheer unabashedly for the Democratic candidates." Tell America that it's a media culture, not a conspiracy.

  
  I don't like to believe the media is intentionally biased and I wait for them to realize they have gone off track and stop being an unbiased information converyor. Yet, the longer I wait, the worse and more obviously partisan it becomes. Can you imagine the red "X" put over any VPs face before Cheney? Can you imagine the media using clownish photographs of any President before Bush in serious news stories? Sure, openly partisan newspapers in the 19th century went further...but the key words are "openly partisan."
  

(2006-08-26) — Just hours after Iran opened a new plant capable of making plutonium “for peaceful purposes”, U.S. President George Bush assured his Iranian counterpart that any B-2 bombers that appear over Tehran in the near future would also serve peaceful purposes.
...
“There’s nothing like the B-2 when it comes to giving peace a chance,” Mr. Bush added.