Hillel Halkin, contributing editor of the New York Sun, reflects on a seemingly lost talent in Israel, occasioned by a reunion of surviving passengers of the Exodus, made famous by the fictional treatment, and exaggeration, of Leon Uris’ book and Otto Preminger’s film. Halkin writes:

But bringing significant numbers of Jews to Palestine was never the real purpose of Aliyah Bet, whose planners understood that they were no match for the British navy. The purpose was public relations, or, to use a less pleasant term, propaganda — and in this, Aliyah Bet succeeded brilliantly. Each turned-back boatload of homeless Holocaust survivors, their families murdered by the Nazis, their tragedy-lined faces staring with longing at the land they were not allowed to enter; each doomed and sometimes violent struggle with the British shore police to reach that land, sometimes by jumping into the water; each newspaper photograph of the detainees in Cyprus, looking at the camera through barbed wire as if they had been returned to Auschwitz or Treblinka — every such story and image was another blow struck in world public opinion against the continuation of the British Mandate and for the creation of a Jewish state. Nothing did more to create sympathy for Zionism in those years than the "failure" of Aliyah Bet.

Today, by contrast:

Israel today has forgotten not only the American boys who manned the Wedgewood, the Haganah, the Arlosoroff, the Ben Hecht, the Hatikvah, the Exodus, the Geula, the Jewish State, the Pan York, and the Pan Crescent. It has forgotten the lessons of Aliyah Bet as well. It's not only the immediate results of what you do or don't do that matters, it's also how it looks. Too often despairing of winning the world's understanding or sympathy, Israelis have developed the attitude that there is no point in fostering their own image or making photogenic gestures, since the world will not appreciate it anyway. They will do what needs to be done and the world can like it or lump it.

This is shooting oneself in the foot. For better or for worse, the world sees images first, what lies behind them only later. An image without a positive truth behind it will sooner or later collapse, but a truth without a positive image may take unaffordably long to register.

The conclusion of Andres Oppenheimer’s column from the Miami Herald sparked my curiosity about the World Bank report it’s based upon:

With democratic institutions, a free press and a professional – not politicized – civil service, corruption can be reduced anywhere.

Granted, the World Bank didn't publicly present the figures as a world ranking of corruption, perhaps fearing that member countries would raise hell if ranked at the bottom of the list. Rather, it listed all countries alphabetically, with the figures on how they measured in their anti-corruption controls on a scale of 1 to 100.

Even that has created an internal political upheaval at the Washington financial institution: Argentina, China and Russia officially complained to the World Bank's top authorities about the report, World Bank officials confirmed to me last week after The Financial Times and Reuters reported the story.

Transparency International puts corruption in the proper context. Its definition:

Corruption is the abuse of entrusted power for private gain. It hurts everyone whose life, livelihood or happiness depends on the integrity of people in a position of authority.

The dire consequences:

Corruption has dire global consequences, trapping millions in poverty and misery and breeding social, economic and political unrest.

Corruption is both a cause of poverty, and a barrier to overcoming it. It is one of the most serious obstacles to reducing poverty.

Corruption denies poor people the basic means of survival, forcing them to spend more of their income on bribes. Human rights are denied where corruption is rife, because a fair trial comes with a hefty price tag where courts are corrupted.

Corruption undermines democracy and the rule of law.

Corruption distorts national and international trade.

Corruption jeopardises sound governance and ethics in the private sector.

Corruption threatens domestic and international security and the sustainability of natural resources.

Those with less power are particularly disadvantaged in corrupt systems, which typically reinforce gender discrimination.

Corruption compounds political exclusion: if votes can be bought, there is little incentive to change the system that sustains poverty.

The conclusion - Corruption hurts everyone.

So, I looked more closely at the World Bank study, all 94-pages with numerous charts of data.

The data and methodology appear as competent as possible.

This paper reports on the latest update of the Worldwide Governance Indicators (WGI) research project covering 212 countries and territories and measuring six dimensions of governance between 1996 and 2006: voice and accountability, political stability and absence of violence, government effectiveness, regulatory quality, rule of law, and control of corruption. This latest set of aggregate indicators are based on hundreds of specific and disaggregated individual variables measuring various dimensions of governance taken from 33 data sources provided by 30 different organizations….

Table 6 mindnumbingly presents summary data.

The BBC, however, conveniently summarizes:

A report measuring the quality of government in 212 countries from 1996 to 2006 found Africa had shown the greatest improvement.

The report judged whether countries had free media, political stability, the rule of law and control of corruption.

Countries in decline included Zimbabwe and Venezuela, but there were as many gainers as losers….

No surprise there. Also, no surprise here: where freedoms have expanded, corruption declined.

The report noted the fast-paced progress of emerging economies, including Estonia, Latvia, the Czech Republic and Costa Rica, which score higher on key dimensions of governance than their industrialised counterparts, including Greece and Italy.

The BBC quotes:

Shlomo Yitzhaki, director of Israel's Central Bureau of Statistics and Professor of Economics at Hebrew University, said the World Bank's governance indicators were a "crucial tool" for policy analysts and decision-makers benchmarking their countries.

"It definitely sets a standard for transparency in data," he added.

Good governance has increasingly become a key factor in granting aid to developing countries, and was a policy closely associated with World Bank head Paul Wolfowitz, who was forced to resign last month.

BTW, Freedom House is a key organization to check in with for tracking the course of freedom in the world.

What happens if “universal healthcare” is decreed, and there’s no doctor in the house? What happens when the proponents of “universal healthcare” also castigate the best and brightest who choose to endure the rigors of medical training by reducing their financial incentive?

A report in the Wall Street Journal says that the Massachusetts experiment in “universal healthcare” may founder on the lack of enough primary care physicians:

State officials have acknowledged the problem. "Health-care coverage without access is meaningless," Gov. Deval Patrick said in March.

As it happens, primary-care doctors, including internists, family physicians, and pediatricians, are in short supply across the country. Their numbers dropped 6% relative to the general population from 2001 to 2005, according to the Center for Studying Health System Change in Washington. The proportion of third-year internal medicine residents choosing to practice primary care fell to 20% in 2005, from 54% in 1998.

A principal reason: too little money for too much work. Median income for primary-care doctors was $162,000 in 2004, the lowest of any physician type, according to a study by the Medical Group Management Association in Englewood, Colo. Specialists earned a median of $297,000, with cardiologists and radiologists exceeding $400,000.

At the same time, the workweek for primary-care doctors has lengthened, and they are seeing more patients. The advent of managed care in the mid-1990s added to the burden as insurance companies called on primary-care doctors to serve as gatekeepers for their patients' referrals to specialty medicine.

An op-ed in USA Today, by an immigration lawyer, delves further, with attention to the British experience with terrorist doctors. Strict screening is the key.

Why haven't we heard any links of these foreign physicians to terrorism in the USA? Most likely because of the extensive background checks that all skilled workers, including doctors, undergo before being admitted. British security clearances for skilled workers are not as extensive, and the process is under review.

It might help to know some basic data:
* Physicians in the USA: 794,893.
* Foreign graduate doctors in the USA: 185,234 (from 127 countries).
* Percentage of doctors in U.S. training programs who are foreigners: 24%.

This is not a new phenomenon. Foreign physicians have made up about this percentage of our doctor population for years. A sizable portion work in medically underserved communities and small towns. This at a time when a shortage of doctors in the USA is expected to grow to as much as 200,000 by 2020.

Why is this shortage happening?

First, the USA has opened almost no new medical schools in the past 25 years. So you have a physician population that has remained flat serving a U.S. population that is expected to grow by 25% between 2000 and 2025.
Major demographic changes in the physician population also must be considered. Nearly one-third of doctors are older than 55, with more choosing early retirement. Fifty percent of all medical school graduates are now women. That is affecting both the total hours worked each year as well as the number of specialists. Family demands are causing many women to reduce their hours or to leave the profession when they have children. Some women doctors avoid fields with difficult call hours, such as anesthesiology and radiology.

Then there are our own demographic changes. The number of Americans older than 65 will increase to 54 million by 2020. As we age, our need for medical care increases.

Finally, as more treatment options are available and new technology is developed, Americans are more likely to seek out the services of a physician or specialist.

Isn’t America great? Ever since the Koran hate crime story broke the other day on LGF and I picked it up here, it has hit the news like a tornado. Michelle Malkin quoted me and I received an email message from Fox News Channel to appear for an interview on Hannity & Colmes. Alas, returning home as late as I did from work tonight, I missed the opportunity.

LGF has since featured numerous threads on the topic with over 1000 comments on Sunday alone, marshalling an outpouring of concern and support for Stanislav Shmulevich, a former Pace University student who has been arrested for desecrating a Koran. According to Charles Johnson of LGF, Stanislav, whom he has contacted, was charged with two felony counts of criminal mischief and aggravated harassment. He was jailed for 24 hours and released without bail after being arraigned on the felony charges.

Several attorneys have already contacted Johnson and pledged their support as well as offers of financial assistance for legal expenses, which have been pouring in. There were many posted comments on the legal ramifications of hate crime law and speculation on how to fight this legal battle of the century. I stayed up late last night pouring over the comments of LGF readers debating what constitutes a hate crime and the many examples of defiling Christian and Jewish sacred texts and artifacts deemed protected speech while desecrating the Koran is now a felony. One reader posted the following shrewd comment: “The koran itself is filled with hate speech and possessing it should be a hate crime.”

I am no legal scholar, but I believe this should be considered for the upcoming legal defense. The Koran is unique among religious texts in promoting and inciting war against unbelievers. According to Robert Spencer, prominent author of books on Islam, there are over 100 verses in the Koran that exhort believers to wage jihad against non-Muslims. Among the admonitions to murder unbelievers is the notorious Verse of the Sword (9:5): “slay the unbelievers wherever you find them.” If hate crime laws are based upon the intent to do harm or incite violence then an aggressive legal offense should mention this with regard to the Koran. They should play hardball with Muslim activist organizations like CAIR and MSA who bully and threaten people into submission and who now are threatening our liberties with our own laws.

One of the comments on LGF was from Stanislav, who is requesting legal help. Interested lawyers with expertise in these areas of students rights and free speech law should follow the daily LGF posts for updates on the efforts to put together a legal defense team.

Hi all,

Thanks for giving me an account here Charles. My first message is brief as I have a meeting with family coming up and wont be back for a while.

Firstly, thank you everyone for support. At the moment, I'm looking for legal advice for this. Yes, the book in question is school property...so charges of vandalism I would understand and not need advice on. Earlier someone posted that you can burn a US flag and claim freedom of political speech, a Koran is the same, can someone with knowledge of law further comment on this as my current legal defence is Google.

Once again, thanks for understanding.

Stanislav

Bruce “McQ” McQuain, at Q and O blog, sat in on a briefing today by “with COL Mark R. French, Deputy Commander for Professional Development and Training, Civilian Police Assistance Training Team (CPATT), Multi-National Security Transition Command - Iraq (MNSTC-I) about the new Italian Carabinieri Police Team sent at the request of the Iraqi Government to help train the MoI Police on special military police tactics that will go into effect in September when the new school is built.”

Bruce “learned a lot about the plans for the National Police, the problems they've encountered until now and how they're rectifying (or attempting to rectify) them.”

French described them as a "bridging force" between the local police and the Iraqi Army, much like the Italian Carabinieri. They are a national civil security force that will, it is hoped, be the "first responder" to any situation which is more than local police can handle. If successful, that would then allow the Iraqi Army to concentrate on external threats.

The training process:

Anyway, Phase I of the plan has already been completed and it was mostly an assessment phase - where are they weak, where do they need help, etc. It also included a command climate survey which is an anonymous questionnaire in which all parts of the command climate are examined. As COL French said, it was very revealing and helped immensely in determining the rest of the training needed.

They're in phase II now. It was originally scheduled to be a 3-4 day refresher or "re-bluing" as he called it, but once they got into it, decided they needed to spend more than a few days re-emphasizing various aspects of their duties. As he said it is about 75% on policing skills (basic policing, human rights, etc) and 25% tactical (patrolling, check points, etc). This phase will end 10 October.

On 18 October, the Carabinieri like training will begin. It is a "train the trainer" effort where selected members of each brigade will be trained by Italian teams of Carabinieri and then go back and become the trainers for their brigades. This is where the true national character of their police work, to include investigation and forensics, will be taught and learned.

Phase IV, at a date to be determined, has the National Police disbursed outside of Baghdad. Presently there are small NP elements in Balad and Samara, but the vast majority are in Baghdad, integrated into the Baghdad security plan and fully invested in that until completion. However, even if they were released from that duty, their training level and their logistics wouldn't allow them to deploy. It won't be until a sufficient level of the Phase III training is complete within the brigades that they'll be deemed tactically ready to go.

The other problem is one we've seen throughout the effort with both the army and police. They cannot, at this time, logistically support themselves. COL French reports a logistics brigade is being stood up right now to support the NP. Obviously that'll take some time. Until it is up and properly functioning, the NP are pretty well tied to their Baghdad bases….

That's the short version of what I learned today about that very critical effort. Yes, it has languished for quite a while, it is an organization that gained a bad reputation because it almost 'self-organized' with little or no vetting. But it appears that the effort under way now has either corrected or is in the middle of correcting most of those deficiencies.

Was Bruce being fed a line?:

Like I said, an interesting call. And another bit of information I can now use to further analyze our effort in Iraq. To me, that is the purpose of these calls. I consider myself and those who sit in on these calls smart enough to know when an effort to spin us is underway. To this point I've not really detected such an effort. And with an open question format at the end, anything that has even remotely smelled of such has been questioned in detail.

IRS Commissioner Mark Everson said in his discussion of “Fiscal Year 2006 Enforcement and Service Results" that, “We’ve placed renewed attention and added resources in the charitable arena to help protect the integrity and maintain faith in the charitable sector,” including “problem areas” in “executive compensation.”

The Philadelphia Inquirer reports how one “Nonprofit is lucrative for founder.”

His organization, the National Association of Town Watch [National Night Out], devoted about a third of its budget in 2005 to pay Peskin a $255,000 salary and $42,000 in benefits, according to the group's most recent tax filings.

According to the NonProfit Times, a business publication covering nonprofit management, the average salary for a charity with less than $1 million in annual revenue - the size of Peskin's organization - is about $70,000. Peskin's pay is in line with that of chief executives of large nonprofits with annual revenue greater than $50 million, according to the trade journal.

Peskin is paid more than any federal official other than the president, who makes $400,000. He is paid more than the governor of any state - Gov. Rendell makes about $164,000 this year. Law enforcement officials don't make what he makes. The Philadelphia police commissioner makes $143,000, and the Pennsylvania State Police commissioner is paid $125,000. They manage departments with thousands of employees.

What’s more:

One reason the association can afford to pay Peskin so handsomely is that American taxpayers subsidize about a third of his organization's $900,000 budget. The Justice Department last year gave Peskin's association a $296,000 crime-prevention grant.

While the grants for National Night Out are a fraction of the Bureau of Justice Assistance's annual $1.5 billion budget, the money continues to flow even as violent crime is increasing and local law enforcement officials complain about reductions in federal assistance.

Some studies indicate that neighborhood-watch programs are not effective at reducing crime because they do not fundamentally change the behavior of criminals.

But, it’s good politics, for politicians:

Town watch has "no effect on violent crime," said Lawrence W. Sherman, director of the Jerry Lee Center of Criminology at the University of Pennsylvania. "And events like National Night Out - one night of marching and protesting - there's zero evidence that works."

But there is zero evidence that political leaders or law enforcement officials are inclined to reduce support for neighborhood-watch groups.

"They sound good and feel good," Sherman said. "You organize a lot of people, and that's good, politically."

Board members defend him:

The board chairman, Herbert M. Gross, 79, a Bala Cynwyd developer now retired to Florida, said Peskin did the work of two people and was "more than worth" his salary.

"It's unbelievable what he's done," said Marc Kooperman, a painting contractor and longtime board member. "He had a vision, and it worked."

OK, so Peskin's $300,000 divided by two is $150,000, on par with Pennsylvania’s governor and more than the State Police commissioner or Philadelphia’s police commissioner. I would guess that the governor and the police commissioners, also, "did the work of two people" but don't receive $300k.

Private, tax-paying corporations’ boards may have the freedom to grant lucrative executive compensation. But, in cases like this of non-profit organizations, subsidized by taxpayer funds and by exemption from paying income taxes and other taxes and fees, taxpayers’ funds are used and there should be more accountability and reasonability.

My post last week about the new film “Rescue Dawn” focused on the resilience and determination to survive an ordeal. POW Paul Galanti offered some insight, and POW Mike Benge – who suffered many of the same conditions as the movie’s main character, Dieter Dengler – reviewed the film.

In my comments, I spoke to “the escapism of the 1973 Paris Accords, any still alive in Laotian communist hands were abandoned,” and provided some links.

Both Galanti and Benge, however -- although the focus of the post was on Dengler’s survival and the characteristics that help survival -- bring my attention to a critique of the film by a family member of one – of many -- who didn’t survive.

According to this critique of the film, “These liberties may be the stock in trade of Hollywood but they are an insult to the brave POW’s and their families.” Dengler’s role is enlarged in the film, and the actions and bravery of other POW’s lessened. The facts provided by the family member are important to accuracy and understanding.

Neither I, nor Galanti or Benge, intended to put the bravery and actions of other POW’s, including those many MIA’s perhaps even braver and more sacrificing, in any doubt.

Last week, I wrote some praise for my local newspaper, the San Diego Union-Tribune, “Appreciation of a Not-NYT’s Newspaper.” This led to a friendly email conversation with the newspaper’s new ombudsman, Carol Goodhue, who recently replaced retired former ombudsman Gina Lubrano. I’d critiqued Ms. Lubrano, second in my series on prominent ombudsmen, for spotty follow-through as a “readers representative,” exampling the newspaper’s unresearched acceptance of a CAIR press release.

Today, Ms. Goodhue’s column demonstrates what happens when an ombudsman does some research. The Associated Press wire story, widely disseminated, is found wanting, and AP as usual doesn’t deign to correct it. The organization misinterpreted, says none other than a leading representative of the Catholic Church, reflects it needs to possibly do a better job of communicating in order to avoid agenda-driven media misinterpretation.

The San Diego Union-Tribune ran the Associated Press’ account of a Papal statement, “Pope affirms Catholicism as only way to salvation.” A reader said the AP story is wrong and pointed Ms. Goodhue at a Vatican website. The newspaper’s religion editor agreed the AP story was off, “it left open the possibility of salvation for people in church communities outside the Catholic Church.” However, Ms. Goodhue writes, “the Associated Press had decided the story didn’t need a correction. I was on my own.”

Ms. Goodhue then spoke with the executive director of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Secretariat for Ecumenical and Inter-religious Affairs, who examined the source document line by line with her. “He said it would have been better to report that the document says that Catholicism provides ‘the truest path' rather than ‘the only true path’ to salvation." He added, “We’ve come to expect that these documents get misinterpreted, and maybe this poses a challenge to the Vatican on how these documents are released.”

My question is, why didn’t the AP do what Ms. Goodhue did, examine the document in depth with someone knowledgeable, instead of running with overwrought reactions? Theology is a complex matter, G-d knows! As are many other issues too quickly subject to agenda journalism. Readers deserve better, and Ms. Goodhue delivers.

I'm neither a theologian nor Catholic, and would have benefited if the AP had delivered better reporting that we depend upon. I'm sure that Ms. Goodhue and I will have occasion to disagree in the future but, at least, she appears thus far to be a "readers representative."

The United Nations “Peacekeeper” forces have racked up quite a record – for sexual abuse of those it’s supposed to protect.

Since the end of the Cold War, the humanitarian focus and political jockeying within the United Nations have actually become more entwined, and the UN’s ability to be a peacemaker declined. Europeans are more willing to go their own way, whatever that is, particularly having little usable military capacity or will. Russia and China exert their new mercantile diplomacy with little regard to human rights, and block those who do have such principles. The agglomeration of satraps that make up most of the rest of the members usually follow oil-money and resenting anything civilized.

To which, the Associated Press reports,

U.N. standards for selecting peacekeepers are too low, and soldiers from countries whose armies are suspected of abuse should not be considered for peacekeeping duty, the U.N.'s chief anti-torture investigator said.

U.N. special rapporteur Manfred Nowak also told the Austrian news magazine Profil in an interview for Monday's editions that the United Nations should reconsider forming its own professional standing army.

Concerns about the quality, training and ethics of peacekeepers are growing as developing nations with questionable human-rights records increasingly send troops for international peacekeeping operations, Nowak said….

U.N. officials have said that more than 300 members of U.N. peacekeeping missions around the world have been investigated for sexual exploitation and abuse over the past three years in nations including Congo, Cambodia and Haiti.

The UN’s budget for “peacekeeping” operations has ballooned to over $5-billion this year, over 25% from the U.S., with little to show for it. Correction: The national providers of troops collect payments from the UN that are profitable.

The UN peacekeepers certainly need to clean up their act.

But, what good is a UN “professional standing army” without the will of members to go where needed, like Darfur, or with the influence of the Arab states’ caucus and their UN allies to only recognize Israel as a malefactor.

(Cross-posted at Gateway Pundit)

Despite my admitted technoboobery, Jim Hoft invited me to guest post at Gateway Pundit this week. Jim’s blog gets high visits due to its content of interest to readers, snappy multiple links, and many photos and graphics. My blog usually gets less visits due to topics of lower interest to readers (like healthcare and Vietnam), wonkish essays with links to (even) longer ones, and my laziness and inability (blamed on our outmoded blog software) to embed photos and graphics. Jim sometimes helps me. He invited me to guest at his blog anyway, graciously saying “I asked you because I like your blogging.”

Last year, I tried to liven things up here by running about a hundred daily Interesting Stuff columns, linking briefly to some of the fascinating discussions I ran into around the web. It soon wonkishly grew into extended excerpts, becoming a major chore, so I stopped. I couldn’t restrain myself to be Hoftian or Reynoldsish. So as to not destroy Gateway Pundit’s popularity, I’ll try again at Gateway Pundit to be brief(er).

I started preparing to be Gateway Pundit’s guest by asking Kurt Hoglund of AJacksonian to send me the code by which he posted at his blog a telling photoessay “Vietnam Then And Now.” When I couldn’t figure out what he’d sent (“I haven't a clue what you just said”), Kurt sent me an essay that I could, just, fathom, below. It struck home.

I took Fortran in grad school to employ the most sophisticated statistical analyses of humongous data series, developed a management accounting system for my Fortune 100 employer that was more advanced than anything IBM had at the time, could program early minicomputers, delighted in doing fancy tricks with programmable typewriters, and worked at pioneering personal computer companies. I, also, was able to work on ‘50’s and early ‘60’s cars. Then something changed: it became too “simple.” More reliable, yes, but simple NOT, unless one has hours and hours and hours to RTFM, and decipher. (Even harder with the online manuals; Some see online manuals coming for medical diagnoses and treatments: I’ll let someone else be the beta test of that surgery!)

Kurt emails me and describes my technoboobery:
NOTE: This proves it. Kurt's email prints out normal, and this post prints out normal, but for some reason buried in Kurt's soul or something it appears with lots of line breaks.

heh! The mystical powers of technology delivered to the fingertips of the unknowing... poor Mr. Franklin must be smiling from beyond on that: the power to craft words so deeply embeded that they are overlooked. But then, my capability to do something simple to my car's engine went away the moment those high voltage lines appeared, also. Technology made the art of maintining one's own car into a science... and the digital tools for easy display of words, images and ideas have also made difficult the understanding of what makes it run.

As an individual who learned computer programming at an early age and
has utilized digital tools for almost two decades, now, I do understand. Yet the heart of a modern nerd is: being damned lazy.

Once upon a time crafting code was done by hand, with line upon line
typed out with one finger on each hand utilized by those with pocket
protectors in dark rooms living amidst a sea of coffee cups. Soon
they realized that they had just coded the same damned line for the
Xth time and were dissatisfied with having to do that, and uproar was
heard in the basements of offices and schools and homes throughout the
land! Yea and verily, would those hand coders not put up with *that*
anymore! And so they used the tools at their disposal to make things
so very easy... and yet cloak them from the rest of humanity by inventing all sorts of new words and concepts and phrases so that
mysticism poured over the tools and some degree of mist called
'technical manuals'.

This first generation had no need of such things and when the second
came up they received the vaunted disdain of generation one: RTFM!

Read the F**king Manual.

And, lo! The manuals were (and are) poorly written, obtuse and
amenable only to having an instructor paid at $60/hour to explain
them, and so life is good for the technologically inclined, as they
now have made a source of everlasting revenue upon the backs of the
unenlightened who would come after them. But, within these vast piles
of unreadable junk the actual gems of how to work the damned stuff is
hidden from view, so that only those who delve in these murky depths
of binary, octal and hexadecimal can the 'easy way out' be found: all
others are lost in a maze of poorly written and documented commands
and instructions and forever decrying that technology is too difficult
to understand... and lack the $60/hour to spend learning it from a
guru or the ability to actually figure out the manuals on their own.
That was by design, so that they *easy* tools would be lost.

Still, for all of that the keys to simplicity abound because, to those
who work in same, they hate to spend time typing and thinking on mechanical things and just want to get the work done... and then goof
off for $150/hour or more.

And so, bequeathed unto you is a simple way to get the TEXT ONLY
version of your web browser to go! Yes, an awesome tool, indeed, as
the clan of techno-elite will only spend time looking at pictures if
it has a high degree of skin tonal content, by and large.

In the land of Microsoft Explorer one may go to 'Internet Options',
either via the browser's 'Tools' or from the 'Control Panel'. From
there one may go to 'Advanced' and find those settings for 'Show pictures', 'Smart image dithering', and likewise all things in the
'Multimedia' area and uncheck those one does not want.

Once done, so long as the mighty asterisk is not involved, a reload of
the webpage will now remove those things that are unchecked and only
show those that are checked!

And life is good!

Even better one may go to a browser command called 'View' and then go
to 'Source' and, yea and verily, a notepad of the actual HTML code to
make the web page is delivered unto you in editable format. Like the
manna from the heavens, the text from online is now fully available
for you to hunt and seek and use the slothful copying and pasting
technique to move into a real word processor for further work! Such
things contained between greater and less than signs are code to tell
how things are displayed, so that < p > begins a paragraph and < /p >
ends same... do note that there are NO SPACES involved, but are added
in case one has a rich text editor so that things do not get, yea and
verily, CF'd. Likewise such things as the < div > for divisions is
also seen and the < a > for inline linking of the text between it and
< /a >. Also seen are such things as img and src, to denote image
link and source link.

Knowing such things allows one to decipher the vagaries of HTML,
invented solely for the purpose of adding on to SGML which itself was
a created abomination to make things easier for display, and difficult
to learn and code. So when, three generations of technology later,
the first of the general populace first hit these things the cry of
WTF? was heard throughout the land. In a mere decade would show up
regularizing of such things to the point of sources available for free
on this internetworked concept so that the unintelligible manuals
would be broken down into their unintelligible paragraphs verbatim and
then *explained* in even more tortuous context... like at this link
place, known as the W3Schools online http://www.w3schools.com/ .

Such is the benificence of these tech gurus that they have become so
slothful as to propose that source code and programs be made available
for free so that, once typed in and verified as good within the bounds
of utility that no one need ever retype it *again*. Thus this place
called Source Forge would come about from those in the Open Source and
Free Software communities, to share in their unintelligible bounty
with the greater mass of humanity which can, of course, make neither
head nor tail of it and wonder why it is given away for free with the
downloading of it? Yet the greater population does not understand the
sloth involved with those that would much rather be downloading images
with high skin tone content or being involved in a virtual world in
which the +10 Vorpal Sword of Utter Massacre is a worthwhile journey
spent, and coding is drudgery. Thus the aforementioned, poorly
documented HTML tidy is grand for doing all sorts of fun things with
said HTML if one bothers to RTFM. And as most do not, the common
settings are good enough, save for blogger... and MS-Office and
OpenOffice which make HTML look horrible.

Thus the HTML tidy need was delivered to those poor techies stuck with
Microsloth productions and they, too, bemoaned that OpenOffice had an
abhorrent method of making HTML and that all needed cleaning up,
forsooth! Even with that the tidiest of HTML from HTML tidy still has
needs and tweaks in its commands to tidy it even more so that the
vaunted and disdained blogger actually can make it look so-so. To
date no one has made that template and I just make it up as I go
along, but would prefer a good template, if my mind was good enough to
figure that out... which is a different story, indeed.

Being from this community and many others that have similar outlook I,
for one, can say, that the tools provided on my desktop today, for
free are far better than what I had on my desk as a government employee a mere 5 years ago *involved* with the geo-spatial content of
intelligence and mapping. And that is because I know just enough
about so much as to be incredibly dangerous! Yet I have not stepped
in front of a speeding bus, so I must be doing something right...

-Kurt

Democracy Project director Winfield Myers alerted me to the news about the recent arrest of a man for desecrating the Koran at Pace University as it was picked up by LGF:

NEW YORK (AP) A 23-year-old man was arrested Friday on hate-crime charges after he threw a Quran in a toilet at Pace University on two separate occasions, police said. Stanislav Shmulevich of Brooklyn was arrested on charges of criminal mischief and aggravated harassment, both hate crimes, police said.

I have been involved over the past year battling the censorship and outrages of the film police at Pace, where the administrators caved in to Muslim Student Association’s pressure and threatened police action against Hillel if they showed the film Obsession. This brings us back to the starting point of this drama last year when a Koran was found in a toilet, as reported in the news at the time:

NEW YORK (AP) - A lower Manhattan college is investigating how a paperback copy of the Quran from the campus library ended up in a public toilet, school officials said Tuesday. The discovery at Pace University was among three separate incidents in the past two weeks involving vandalism with racial or religious overtones. In the other two, racial slurs were scrawled on a student’s car parked at a satellite campus in Westchester County and on a bathroom wall at the downtown campus.

These incidents fueled the MSA to pressure the administration to shut down the Pace Hillel events. After these incidents the Council on American-Islamic Relations jumped into the act holding a town meeting at Pace University to combat “Islamophobia.” The administration appeased them by changing the designation of the Koran incident from “vandalism” to “hate crime” and referred it to the New York Police Department's hate crimes unit. This has presently resulted in the arrest of Stanislav Shmulevich to the cheers of CAIR and it's not known whether or not he's a student and no further evidence in the arrest has been offered at this point. Justice has been served in the eyes of those who are determined to see Sharia law prevail.

The other incidents “with racial or religious overtones” at Pace University were swastikas painted on a bathroom wall and on a Holocaust memorial event poster, the desecration of a Menorah on campus and other vicious antisemitic attacks which never rose to the level of hate crime, nor should they so along as burning the American flag is free speech and the photograph Piss Christ was the winner of "Awards in the Visual Arts" competition sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts. However, this demonstrates clear evidence of a double standard lurking at Pace, throughout academia and trickling down throughout the body politic where Muslims and certain identity groups get preferential treatment while others are spurned.

As this news story unfolds, Stanislav Shmulevich, whether a student of Pace or not, should seek legal representation to overturn this outrageous violation of his constitutional rights. There is no right in a democracy not to be offended although the threats and bullying tactics of CAIR and MSA have forced the hand of Pace administrators and New York’s Police Department to do their sinister bidding.

Last year I tried experimenting with a daily collection of short pieces from Interesting Stuff I came across. It grew into a chore as I wonkishly expanded from short references to full-blown excerpts. Just this once, anyway, I’ll try again.

Evening Parade In Honor Of Wounded Warriers
No imagination needed. Reality.

GayPatriot posts that Cindy Sheehan lacks real cojones
Use your imagination.

Republican's Shine In Capitol Hill "Hot 50" List
Hot Hill Babes
Don’t abuse your imagination. -- Also, then try not to hurl at #4 (Get thee to _____!)

Super Empowered Individuals
Imagine! Be afraid, Be very afraid: Mark Safranski scared the heck out of me (plus cool picture)

Who needs Scott Thomas when you've got Amit Paley.
Imagination run wild.

Brave New Courts and Lawyers
Imagine British judges without wigs.

Lawrence Gulotta asks if we can “enjoy the art and ignore the politics.”
Not at these costs
Poor reality; Lots of imagining.

Mugabe Says He Will Print More Money
Imaginary money

Imagine chickens coming home to roost

Imagine if Hillary really had a rack (Would they still be picking on Mrs. Thompson?); Imagine Edwards with a rack

Imagine no “Summer of Love”; How many’d still be alive and get to live

Imagine tuition scaled to worth, or conversely to worthlessness; Either way, most of the “studies” degrees would come free

Imagine 40,000 less Afghan children if not for us

This is what Germans are taught by their media to imagine about Americans (my mother-in-law in Germany confirms)

Imagine the New York Times could count

Can’t Imagine a week without Mark, but tomorrow heeeeee’s back. Left, be afraid, very afraid – errant Republicans, too. (His memory is as long as mine.) And, Imagine the 10th taken to new heights by Reagan, Thompson, Tapscott, & Morrissey

Imagine Cong. Jefferson had stored lucre with prime rib; Would it have been discovered sooner?

Imagine he’d been like John D. Rockefeller (If you don’t remember.)

Imagine anyone listened to Radio America. (Unimaginable, thus Dems push unfairness doctrine)

Imagine human rights applied to Jews.

Imagine educators had something better to do, like educate. – See what real imagination can do.

Imagine Don Corleone speaking Russian.

MidEast Imagination

The New York Times reports that “CUNY Plans to Raise Its Admissions Standards.”

The chancellor said he had long planned to ratchet up standards further. The new move, which has been discussed with some college presidents but has not been announced publicly, is also a response to some professors’ complaints that too many students are poorly prepared for college work, especially in math….

“We are very serious in taking a group of our institutions and placing them in the top segment of universities and colleges,” said Matthew Goldstein, the university chancellor, who described the plan in an interview. “That is the kind of profile we want for our students.”

When I started at Brooklyn College, C.U.N.Y. in 1964, on the first day of freshman math the professor gave us the final exam, saying that any who couldn’t pass it didn’t deserve to be at Brooklyn College. We all passed, and the professor spent most of the rest of the term in one of the most fascinating expositions – no one cut class -- of the nuances of Alice In Wonderland.

At that time, Brooklyn College ranked in the top tier of American colleges. To be admitted, you had to rank in the top 2% in the country. I barely squeaked in.

Brooklyn College and the other senior colleges of C.U.N.Y. currently rank well, in the top 400, and C.U.N.Y. is trying to recapture its former stature.

That’s a challenge.

CUNY is proud of its legacy as a supportive environment for immigrant talent. At present, 40% of our more than 400,000 students were born outside the United States. These students represent nearly 170 nationalities and speak 120 different languages.

My aunt Muriel, now 90 and still able to out-debate me, was one of Brooklyn College’s first students. When she began primary school, she only spoke Yiddish. She hammered me mercilessly in high school to try harder, because getting into Brooklyn College was all we could afford, and it was an outstanding launch in life. C.U.N.Y. graduates were considered top rate.

The New York Times article continues:

Still, some CUNY professors fear that the new requirements will keep low-income and black and Hispanic students from entering bachelor’s degree programs. The same concern was voiced nine years ago, when students needing remedial instruction were barred. Students, faculty and some elected officials also argued then that enrollments would plunge.

Enrollments, in fact, have grown since then. But the proportion of black students at the top five colleges fell to 14 percent of regularly admitted freshmen last year, from 20 percent in 1999, according to the university’s data. (Those figures do not include those admitted through SEEK, a program for economically and educationally disadvantaged students, who do not have to meet the same criteria.) The proportion of Hispanic students has held even.

William Crain, a City College psychology professor who fought the earlier change, said he opposed the new plan because he feared it would keep low-income and black and Hispanic students from entering bachelor’s degree programs. “This is turning the university into more of a middle-class university,” he said.

Duh! That’s the mission objective of C.U.N.Y., to give opportunities to the poor to join the middle class, and upper. C.U.N.Y. graduates, including General Powell, and the country benefited from C.U.N.Y.’s high standards.

In 1967, I attended a faculty senate debate on the SEEK program, the consensus being that it was the college’s heritage and mission to reach out. I worked in Bedford-Stuyvesant, and participated in tutoring, but most of SEEK was even more basic, like providing bus and subway fare to poor but otherwise qualified students. The program was small and fairly successful.

Then, in 1970, Mayor Lindsey expanded SEEK to insanity, imposing “open admissions” on C.U.N.Y. The New York Times article doesn’t refer to the destruction of a great university. Blogger Fausta, who attended C.U.N.Y. in the early 1990’s tells of her experience with a text for native Spanish speakers:

The professor, by lowering his standards so the students wouldn't have too much hardship, was condemning his students to sounding like ignoramuses.

Fausta quotes an article from the Economist:

What went wrong? Put simply, City dropped its standards….City scrapped its admissions standards altogether. By 1970, almost any student who graduated from New York's high schools could attend….

The quality of education collapsed. At first, with no barrier to entry, enrolment climbed, but in 1976 the city of New York, which was then in effect bankrupt, forced CUNY to impose tuition fees. An era of free education was over, and a university which had once served such a distinct purpose joined the muddle of America's lower-end education.

By 1997, seven out of ten first-year students in the CUNY system were failing at least one remedial test in reading, writing or math (meaning that they had not learnt it to high-school standard). A report commissioned by the city in 1999 concluded that Central to CUNY's historic mission is a commitment to provide broad access, but its students' high drop-out rates and low graduation rates raise the question: “Access to what?”

Dropout rates soared, and those who attained a degree were considered third-rate.

C.U.N.Y. has been trying hard to recover from its near destruction, with successes, not by pandering but by returning to its roots: excellence. And, those wanting to attend and advance their lives now try harder in high school, and in college.

Back to the New York Times article:

Some CUNY officials, like Ricardo R. Fernández, president of Lehman College in the Bronx, who were not big supporters of that change, said they had come to embrace it.

“Perhaps I have become more convinced that students are able to rise to the challenge,” Dr. Fernández said.

He added that higher admissions standards would give Lehman added cachet and help it attract some of the 8,000 Bronx students who attend CUNY colleges in Manhattan that have tougher admissions requirements than Lehman does.

Edison O. Jackson, president of Medgar Evers College in Brooklyn, said higher admissions standards had increased the proportion of students in the college’s bachelor’s degree program to about half of his student population, while the college’s associate’s degree track had shrunk.

“Students are coming in and saying, ‘I want to move into the baccalaureate program and into my major much more quickly,’ ” Dr. Jackson said. “And they are.”

Last April, I wrote about the deforestation in Vietnam and in June about the deforestation in Cambodia, in both cases politicos, their cronies and international businesses cozily profiteering and indigenous peoples suffering the loss of their way of life and resources to live.

Recently, NGO’s Global Witness and Human Rights Watch reported on these depredations, and called for international action, to cut off the funding that facilitates this, as Montagnard Foundation calls it, Triangle of Death.

Below is a press release from the Montagnard Foundation, with links to the in depth Global Witness report and Human Rights Watch’s statement, which is included in this post, and the action statement by the Montagnard Foundation..

IMMEDIATE RELEASE: 27 July 2007 Spartanburg, SC, USA

THE TRIANGLE PROJECT: The governments of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia have embarked on a massive economic development project in the vast region (triangle area) of their countries. The “master plan” was adopted in agreements reached between the Prime Ministers of Viet Nam, Laos and Cambodia at their 3rd summit in 2004 and ratified by the three countries on 28 November 2004. The triangle area encompasses over a hundred thousand square miles in the region bordering these three countries and has already resulted in deforestation and the forced removal of indigenous Degar Montagnards from their ancestral lands. Endemic levels of corruption exist at every level of government in these three countries and environmental exploitation and land rights exploitation has negatively affected the indigenous peoples throughout the region. Deforestation is continuing at unprecedented levels in Cambodia and Laos as these countries turn a blind eye to illegal logging, permitting officials at the highest levels of government to reap massive profits from deforestation. Global Witness has directly implicated the Cambodia government in this abuse of power in a 95 page report. See: Global Witness report.

The government of Vietnam has already decimated the ancient forests of the Central Highlands leaving Cambodia and Laos’s rain forests next in line. Throughout the region the indigenous peoples, Degar Montagnards and other indigenous minorities such as the Hmong face forced or coerced removals from their lands where they will be driven into poverty and malnutrition or killed. Little has been done by donor nations to confront the corruption and Global Witness calls the donors, “spineless” while Human Rights Watch stated on 15 June 2007 “The $5 billion in aid plowed into Cambodia in the past decade has yielded little in return for the donors or the Cambodian people”. See: Human Rights Watch statement.

Human Rights Watch Statement:

Cambodia: Donors Must Hold Government Accountable
Banning of Forest Report Mocks Commitments to Human Rights
(New York, June 15, 2007) – Cambodia’s international donors should not accept any more empty promises from the Cambodian government on human rights, the rule of law and good governance, Human Rights Watch said today. The annual Consultative Group meeting of donors is scheduled to take place in Phnom Penh on June 19-20, and donors are expected to pledge more than US$600 million in additional aid for the next year.

Human Rights Watch said that the Cambodian government has made virtually no progress in the past decade on key pledges to donors on the rule of law or judicial independence. Impunity for human rights violations remains the rule. Corruption is rampant. Natural resources are still being plundered. Those who report on such abuses are threatened or harassed and sometimes subject to violence.

“The $5 billion in aid plowed into Cambodia in the past decade has yielded little in return for the donors or the Cambodian people,” said Brad Adams, Asia director at Human Rights Watch. “The meeting has become an empty annual ritual, with the government making and breaking promises every year. There will be more promises made this year, but without serious donor pressure they, too, will be broken.”

Human Rights Watch called on the Cambodian government to rescind its June 3 order to “ban and collect” the recent report by Global Witness. The report, “Cambodia’s Family Trees,” alleges illegal logging by individuals close to Prime Minister Hun Sen. It also claims that the government’s promises to end illegal logging have been broken, that the army, military police and police are deeply involved in illegal logging, and that funds from illegal logging support Hun Sen’s personal bodyguard unit, which has been responsible for human rights abuses.

The government should officially repudiate reported statements by Kompong Cham provincial governor Hun Neng, Hun Sen’s brother. Hun Neng reportedly said on June 11 that “If they [Global Witness] come to Cambodia, I will hit them until their heads are broken.”

“The government’s reaction to the Global Witness report shows its lack of commitment to freedom of expression and public debate, and its continued thuggish behavior,” said Adams. “Donors should insist that the government undertake a credible judicial investigation into the criminal activities detailed in the report, rather than resort to violent threats against its authors. Donors often complain about a lack of political will from the government, but this will be a test of their political will, too.”

Human Rights Watch said that donors have a major role to play in determining Cambodia’s future by continuing their assistance to civil society and insisting that the government fully comply with commitments made at successive donor meetings dating back to 1993. After billions of dollars of donor support over the past 14 years, it is time for a clear and unambiguous signal to be sent to the government. Donors should make it clear that they can no longer accept previously unmet promises.

For more than a decade, donors have been providing aid equivalent to roughly half Cambodia’s national budget. As donors have noted, good governance is directly linked to a country’s pace of development. There is little doubt that Cambodia’s development continues to be slowed by the country’s poor governance.

“If donors are serious about development in Cambodia, they should start generating momentum for real reform,” said Adams. “They need to emphasize, not marginalize, the links between human rights and development.”

Development assistance and budgetary support should be contingent on the government meeting agreed benchmarks on human rights, the rule of law, and good governance, such as:

· Tackling impunity for human rights abuses, including the many extrajudicial killings carried out during and after the July 1997 coup by Hun Sen’s government;
· Ceasing to harass and threaten civil society activists and opposition party members;
· Ensuring that the rights of individuals and organizations to defend and promote human rights are protected, including the right to peacefully criticize and protest government policies, in accordance with the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the 1998 United Nations General Assembly Declaration on Human Rights Defenders;
· Creating an independent and restructured National Election Committee;
· Liberalizing electronic media ownership rules, including allowing transmitters of private, critical media to be as strong as those of pro-government private stations;
· Complying fully with previous Consultative Group commitments to address corruption and misuse of natural resources and other state assets; these include public disclosure of information concerning management of land, forests, mineral deposits and fisheries, as well as the location of military development zones; and,
· Passing legislation on asset disclosure and anti-corruption that meets international standards, and appointing an independent, international external auditor for government finances.

Past meetings of the Consultative Group have been attended by 18 countries and five intergovernmental organizations: Australia, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Japan, Korea, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Russia, Singapore, Sweden, the United Kingdom and the United States, plus the Asian Development Bank, the European Commission, the International Monetary Fund, the United Nations Development Program, and the World Bank.

“The donors’ list of conditions hardly changes over time, and the government simply ignores them year after year,” said Adams. “Hun Sen continues to run circles around the donors, making the same empty promises every year and laughing all the way to the bank.”

THE MONTAGNARD FOUNDATION CALLS ON:

International donors namely, the United States, Japan, the European Union, Australia, Canada, Denmark, England, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Korea, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Russian Federation, Singapore, Sweden, the IMF, United Nations, World Bank and Asian Development Bank to consider withdrawing funding to the Triangle Project and to review their overall aid commitments to Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam given the endemic history of corruption, environmental degradation, exploitation and human rights violations committed by these three countries.

The National Education Association (NEA) is America’s largest union, but doesn’t believe its retirement plan for teachers should be covered by ERISA, requiring that the interests of the teachers is primary. Instead, its retirement plan contains over-costly investments, and the NEA receives millions from the vendor. The NEA spends tens of millions annually on Leftist causes and Democrat politicians. 45% of its teacher members are Democrats, and 94% of contributions go to Democrats.

A class-action suit has been launched against the NEA.

To learn more, see my column in today’s Examiner, “NEA Now Finds Itself In The Dock.”

It takes resilience and determination to survive an ordeal, the more the ordeal, the more determination and resilience needed. Those who haven’t faced the prospect or reality of the extreme dangers in this world aren’t the best qualified to be reviewing those who have.

The professional film critics reviews have been favorable of the new film “Rescue Dawn,” about the escape by U.S. Navy pilot Dieter Dengler from horrendous conditions during his capture in 1966 by Laotian communists.

But, too much, the reviews have focused on film-making or irrelevancies and many inserted their current political biases.

Instead, our review is from a POW who survived similar ordeals to Dieter Dengler.

The Washington Post’s review says, “It's an instant classic of the form, a portrait of courage and sacrifice at their most stirring, but subversively resisting cant and cliche.”

My local San Diego Union-Tribune film critic said of the director, “ Mostly [Werner] Herzog gets everything mud-real and ham-free. “

Most critics comment on the determination and resilience displayed by Dengler. For example, the Los Angeles Daily News film critic quotes Herzog: “Because America allowed him to become a pilot, he was so loyal to this country. He had the qualities I like about Americans – self-reliance, courage, optimism, loyalty. All in this man.”

Many critics, also, can’t resist inserting their own anti-Vietnam war and anti-military biases, like USA Today’s, “this is all about escape. And as prison-break movies go, Rescue ranks among the best. But in terms of what gave Dengler and his co-captives the resilience to survive their brutal prison camp in the Laotian jungle, we get little more than military jingoism and some surprisingly simple stereotypes. It's not enough, though, to derail the picture and the mesmerizing performance of Christian Bale, who plays Dengler.”

Showbiz’ Variety finds it important that, “This may be the first Vietnam-set film in history not to feature a bar of Jimi Hendrix, the Rolling Stones or indeed any other rock music on its soundtrack.” Then Variety extends its inanity by reaching for an absurd comparison to Iraq: “Resonances with current situation in Iraq -- the deluded belief it will all be over soon, the scenes of torture that echo Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib -- are there, but not overstated.” Panties on head “echo” beatings, starvation, untreated jungle diseases!

After reviewing the reviews, one is still left wondering what clue has a bunch of film critics who’ve never come near to the conditions suffered by Dieter Dengler, nor probably never served in war, or served in the military.

In particular, I was interested in the determination and resilience displayed by Dengler. A snippet of dialogue: When asked what “got you through this ordeal?,” Dengler replied: “Empty what is full. Fill what is empty. Scratch where it itches.” Director Herzog says, “To me, those words are the essence of survival.”

It reminded me of my Marine Corps attitude training: “Every day’s a holiday and every meal a feast.”

I asked my friend Paul Galanti, shot down over North Vietnam in 1966 and a POW for 7-years, about “the attitude among the POW’s that made survival, and overcoming sometimes, possible?”

Paul Galanti’s response:

Bruce, being a POW is a humbling experience. Like Marine Boot Camp, one is reduced to the bare essentials. The Marines build their charges into fabulous fighting machines. We POW’s re-built ourselves – usually into better men than we were before.

Galanti adds:

Bruce, Dieter got shot down after me and I didn’t know him in the fleet. All I know is what I hear and it’s all flattering to him. Everybody I know who knew him said he was the real McCoy. He was one of a handful who was totally prepared for captivity and planned ways to escape. The rest of us were prepared to die, but captivity? No way. So, out of sight out of mind went the prospect.

Indeed, of Americans captured in Laos, only about 10 returned alive (mostly because they were in the hands of the North Vietnamese). Not to disturb the escapism of the 1973 Paris Accords, any still alive in Laotian communist hands were abandoned. All we’ve gotten since are somes’ bones. As of 2005, “Of the 1,836 Americans missing from the Vietnam War, the remains of 375 are believed to be in Laos. Since the end of the war, 194 Americans have been accounted-for from Laos.” (For more about Laos POW/MIA’s see here.)

I then turned to another friend, Mike Benge, who suffered many of the conditions that Dieter Dengler had. Benge, captured in 1968, was led on a death march through South Vietnam and Cambodia to North Vietnam, chained in a cage, starved, diseased.

Benge, however, had made his mind up that he wouldn't die. He treated his ulcerated body by lying in creeks and allowed small fish to feed off the dead tissue (a primitive debridement), then caught the fish and ate them raw. He caught small, green frogs and swallowed them whole. He did everything he could to supplement his meager food ration.

By the time he reached the camp the Vietnamese called "the land of milk and honey" his hair was white and he was so dehydrated and emaciated that other POWs estimated his age to be over seventy years old. He was, at the time, only thirty-three.

Here’s Mike Benge’s review of “Rescue Dawn.”

The other night my daughter said, “Hey Dad, let’s go see a movie,“ and I replied, “Which one?” She said, “Rescue Dawn.” “Dad, it’s a movie about a Vietnam POW.” “I thought you’d like it, but then do you think watching it might bother you?” It was a rhetorical question, for she knew that I had no hang-ups over the Vietnam War and my incarceration.

I had heard of the movie, for there was a lot of chatter about it on the NAMPOW net; however, from some of the reviews, I thought it was probably just another “hokey” Hollywood exploitative movie. I remember that one reviewer called it as a “high-end, art-house friendly 'Rambo’ movie.” Others compared “Rescue Dawn” with other movies that German director Werner Herzog had made, and with other war and POW movies, but having nothing of substance to say. This not only gave me a case of the shorts, but what they said was an indication that the reviewers had no real-life experience or basis on which to competently review “Rescue Dawn;” for their world is fantasy. With this in mind, I said, “Let’s go Dira, I have to see it for myself.

If I were inclined to have nightmares, “Rescue Dawn” would have given me some bad ones; luckily I’m not. I wasn’t a pilot like Dieter Dengler; but I shared similar experiences as a civilian POW. For once, Hollywood got it right thanks to Herzog who captured the blood, sweat, tears, fear, emotions, hunger, the steaming and unrelenting jungle, and the fragility of man under the degrading and filthy conditions of POWs in the jungle camps of Indochina.

The depiction of Dengler being told he could escape torture and imprisonment if he signed a letter denouncing the United States could have easily been that of my friend Colonel Ted Guy, also captured in Laos but taken to Hanoi; and tortured he was for the entire stint of his incarceration. Dengler survived because he had the will to survive, for without it you succumbed to the horrendous conditions of your captivity. However, Dengler’s courage and heroism was not unique, and was found among the many POWs that were fortunate to survive captivity in the Vietnam War.

Through visual nuances, Herzog also captured the true situation of the war in Laos, where over 90% of the Americans lost in Laos were in territories under the total control of the North Vietnamese (NVA) (depicted in pith helmets and green uniforms). The NVA maintained jurisdiction over the POWs, even though they were farmed out for care to the Laotians. This was of course lost on the audience; but my opinion of Herzog as a director shot up dramatically. Eugene DeBruin, depicted in the movie as the one who stayed behind, survived the escape but was never released.

You left the theater knowing that you had seen one hell of a movie, and it wasn’t a “high-end, art-house friendly 'Rambo’ movie”; the difference being is that Dengler story was real not fantasy . And for sure, Dengler had conviction and was the real McCoy; something you can’t say for a lot of our legislators on Capitol Hill.

Mike Benge, civilian POW South Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos and North Vietnam ‘68-73

It seems that Hollywood prefers a narrative that veers Left, and exaggerates, to make Left points.

Yesterday, I wrote about the partisan news selection by the New York Times. Discussing “Whose Ox Is Gored,” my example was the NYT’s differential treatment of multinationals and charities’ tax schemes, the former being reported and the latter not, the former being a Democrat target and the latter a source of funds and support to Democrats.

Today’s San Diego Union-Tribune, my local newspaper, on its front-page exhibits a different approach, “Comic-Con’s Charity Status Draws Questions.”

The Comic-Con convention in San Diego is the city’s largest. The San Diego Union-Tribune is generally a booster of local enterprise. Yet, the newspaper does not flinch from discussing a sacred cow, to some.

Mention “public charity” to most people and they think of homeless shelters and food banks. Spider-Man doesn't immediately spring to mind.

But the 38th annual San Diego Comic-Con International, which opens tonight, is registered with the federal government as a public charity, placed in the same general category as many schools, hospitals and churches.

As such, the pop-culture extravaganza, which generates about $5 million in revenue each year, is exempt from income taxes and pays less in city traffic-control fees.

That loss of money to government coffers means the public is, in effect, subsidizing an event that has become a massive promotional vehicle for new movies, TV shows, comics and toys.

Some charity watchdogs raise their eyebrows at the appropriateness of it for Comic-Con.

“It is a real stretch to call a group whose purpose is to promote comics via a highly commercialized event a charity,” said Sandra Miniutti, a vice president for Charity Navigator. “How does that benefit the greater good of society?”

Daniel Borochoff, president of the American Institute of Philanthropy, also wondered about the public benefit. “The people who appear to be profiting are the pop-culture purveyors who have a great marketing opportunity there,” he said.

Comic-Con is registered with the Internal Revenue Service as a 501(c)(3) organization. Groups in that category may qualify for exemption from federal income tax if they serve the public good, typically through poverty-assistance, religious, educational, scientific or literary programs.

Comic-Con organizers said their event, which last year attracted about 124,000 people to the San Diego Convention Center, qualifies as educational.

“We strive to inform the public that comics are as viable an art form as other art you may find in a museum, or in a gallery, or a bookstore or even a film festival,” said David Glanzer, director of marketing and public relations for the convention.

The rest of the report is as balanced, and very informative.

Like any news junkie, I’ve had my share of public and private disagreements with the editors and reporters at my local newspaper. However, I’ve often praised several news practices there that should be more widely emulated.

Local newspapers are dependent upon wire services. The San Diego Union-Tribune subscribes to many, instead of one or a few, and often blends together different wire service reports and its own reporting, to provide more complete information.

The editors at the San Diego Union-Tribune have a diverse range of politics and views. Thus, its editorials, columns and reporting tends, not always but usually, to get balanced and subject to fairness.

The investigators and reporters at the San Diego Union-Tribune go where the story is or leads, exposing local Republican conservative Congressman Cunningham’s illicit self-dealings as well as Democrat liberal Congressman Filner’s wife being among his largest beneficiary of his campaign spending.

Good journalism, and the efforts to good journalism, do not as often get a kudos as the egregious. It should, to encourage the good, and drive out the bad.

Thank you San Diego Union-Tribune.

Don Surber, editorial writer and columnist for the Charleston Daily Mail, posted at his blog how the Associated Press referred to the National Legal and Policy Center as “a conservative group” when investigating Democrat Congressman Alan Mollohan, and as “a government and ethics watchdog group” when investigating Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski.

Similar emphases also occur in selection of what news to report.

The Boston Globe, owned by the New York Times, ran the Associated Press story on the 28-page letter about tax abuses by tax-exempt organizations by the IRS Commissioner to the Senate Finance Committee.

The New York Times did not run the story.

Instead, the New York Times ran a story about a “Tax Break Used by Drug Makers Failed to Add Jobs.”

In the first case, according to the Congressional Budget Office, “In 2003, 38.6 million tax returns claimed $145.7 billion in itemized charitable deductions.” On top of that are the tens of billions of receipts each year not taxable to tax-exempt organizations. The AP story reports that,

The tax-exempt and government entities world comprises some 3 million groups controlling over $13 trillion in assets and ranging from small volunteer community organizations to sovereign Indian tribes and large pension funds.

Among the problems noted by the IRS Commissioner:

--"Many tax-exempt hospitals are difficult to distinguish meaningfully from for-profit hospitals; many tax-exempt credit unions may be hard to distinguish from for-profit banks; and many tax-exempt and for-profit nursing homes may meet the same standards."
--A review of executive compensation found that almost one-third of organizations reported compensation incorrectly or incompletely.
--A February 2006 report on the political actions of some tax-exempt organizations found that nearly three-fourths of the 82 examinations completed uncovered some level of prohibited political campaign activity.

A New York Times, apparently more concerned about private industry, particularly one it dislikes (pharmaceuticals), instead focuses on a one-time legislated return of foreign profits by multinational companies to be taxed in the U.S. – with a break in rate, to incent the return and payment of otherwise legally avoidable taxes.

Drug makers are not the only American multinationals using tax loopholes to declare large portions of their income beyond the reach of the Internal Revenue Service. The Brookings Institution estimates that multinational companies are using overseas tax shelters to lower their payments to the Treasury by about $50 billion a year.

Now, tax-exempts that abuse tax exemptions are of a different order of compliance problem than multinationals that legitimately use tax codes to avoid more taxes. Both are appropriate concerns. But, the NYT’s chooses the latter and not the former.

Does the higher proportion of contributions that go to Democrats from tax-exempts' employees or via allied political action committees, or the causes supported, affect the NYT’s perspective of what is news and what is a matter of tax equity?

The Wall Street Journal calls it “Cheese Headaches: Wisconsin Reveals The Cost Of ‘Universal’ Health Care.”

[I]t reveals where the "single-payer," universal coverage folks end up. Democrats who run the Wisconsin Senate have dropped the Washington pretense of incremental health-care reform and moved directly to passing a plan to insure every resident under the age of 65 in the state. And, wow, is "free" health care expensive. The plan would cost an estimated $15.2 billion, or $3 billion more than the state currently collects in all income, sales and corporate income taxes. It represents an average of $510 a month in higher taxes for every Wisconsin worker.

Employees and businesses would pay for the plan by sharing the cost of a new 14.5% employment tax on wages. Wisconsin businesses would have to compete with out-of-state businesses and foreign rivals while shouldering a 29.8% combined federal-state payroll tax, nearly double the 15.3% payroll tax paid by non-Wisconsin firms for Social Security and Medicare combined.

This employment tax is on top of the $1 billion grab bag of other levies that Democratic Governor Jim Doyle proposed and the tax-happy Senate has also approved, including a $1.25 a pack increase in the cigarette tax, a 10% hike in the corporate tax, and new fees on cars, trucks, hospitals, real estate transactions, oil companies and dry cleaners. In all, the tax burden in the Badger State could rise to 20% of family income, which is slightly more than the average federal tax burden.

It gets worse.

As if that's not enough, the health plan includes a tax escalator clause allowing an additional 1.5 percentage point payroll tax to finance higher outlays in the future. This could bring the payroll tax to 16%. One reason to expect costs to soar is that the state may become a mecca for the unemployed, uninsured and sick from all over North America. The legislation doesn't require that you have a job in Wisconsin to qualify, merely that you live in the state for at least 12 months. Cheesehead nation could expect to attract health-care free-riders while losing productive workers who leave for less-taxing climes.

It get worse, when one considers that Wisconsin is not one of the poorer states nor contain the poorest residents. A list of the 100 poorest locations in America doesn’t contain one from Wisconsin. Costs would be significantly higher in other states or nationally.

It gets worse. Even the Green Bay Press-Gazette, in favor of such a plan, is taken aback by the manner in which the Democrat controlled state senate passed the bill:

[L]et’s face it: They drafted the proposal in secret, introduced it to an unsuspecting world on a Monday and passed it the next day.

The WSJ column ends:

The last line of defense against this plan are the Republicans who run the Wisconsin House. So far they've been unified and they recently voted the Senate plan down. Democrats are now planning to take their ideas to the voters in legislative races next year, and that's a debate Wisconsinites should look forward to. At least Wisconsin Democrats are admitting how much it will cost Americans to pay for government-run health care. Would that Washington Democrats were as forthright.

The Associated Press reports that,

The [Republican] Assembly removed the plan from its version of the budget that passed earlier this month.

A conference committee made up of Democrats and Republicans from both the Assembly and Senate is expected to begin work this week on reaching a compromise.

Compromise! %^$#&*^#@*&

Few professors of Middle East studies (or any subject) can equal Georgetown University's John Esposito in intellectual consistency. Call him what you will, no one can deny that Esposito, who heads up Georgetown's Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding, upholds the wishes of his benefactors. (The Center was opened with a $20 million gift from the Prince himself--the same man whose $10 million gift to NYC after 9/11 was refused by then-Mayor Giuliani in light of Alwaleed's call for America to "reexamine" her policies toward the Middle East--i.e., weaken ties with Israel.) Whatever the question, the answer is always the same: Because Islamism is the road to democracy in the Muslim world, Islamists must be understood and supported, for they have nothing in common with extremists. Except, of course, their goal of worldwide Sharia (Islamic) law. A small thing, of course.

My Campus Watch colleague, Cinnamon Stillwell, recently blogged on Esposito; yesterday, I responded to a highly misleading column he penned for the Washington Post.

We stress the same general attributes exhibited by Esposito: a penchant for issuing apologias for Islamists (including Sami al-Arian); a refusal to address straightforwardly the severe problems within the world of contemporary Islam; and a remarkable (and lamentable) network of friends at the White House, State Department, and across academe.

Cinnamon has also published an article on why Campus Watch is needed, especially in California, where she lives. She concentrates on Middle East studies, but similar examples of intellectual malfeasance could be offered from disciplines across the humanities and soft social sciences.

Update: Cinnamon has an additional post at her website that extends her comments on John Esposito and Muslims Speak Out, the ongoing event sponsored by On Faith, the Washington Post/Newsweek blog. As she says, this speak out gives voice to all the wrong people.

I am very inspired by the noble efforts of the veterans organization Vets for Freedom to mobilize Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans to defend our nation on our own shores. It may sound presumptuous but the major battle of the Iraq war is being fought on Capitol Hill and we are poised to win the war with organizations like VFF leading the charge. VFF is a privately funded group of combat veterans who are being voluntarily deployed to lobby Washington lawmakers with the message that General Petraeus’ troop surge strategy is working and a precipitous withdrawal would bring an unmitigated defeat against our enemy al Queda-in-Iraq and its clones.

This is a message that must be heard above the din on Capitol Hill. Last week’s defeatist proposals for redeployment, withdrawal, and surrender debated on the Senate floor, that fortunately failed to get enough votes to become legislation forcing President Bush to end the war, saw armies of antiwar radicals massing on Capitol Hill to support the Democrats and lobby indecisive Republicans who are steadily joining the ranks of panic stricken Republican Senators Lugar, Voinovich, and Warner who are more concerned about reelection defeat than defeat in Iraq.

VFF bused over 25 Iraq combat veterans to Washington to lobby lawmakers and contend with antiwar groups and their minions actively behind the anti-surge Democrats and targeting Republicans facing tough reelection bids in 2008. The antiwar group, Iraq Veterans Against the War came to lobby in Washington last week. They are an organization of veterans, some of whom have become instant media stars by advocating for an immediate withdrawal which plays right into the enemy’s hand in wartime. Jesse Macbeth, a former IVAW member, gained immediate notoriety as a veteran Army Ranger alleging that his combat unit deliberately committed atrocities against unarmed civilians in Iraq, executing children in front of their parents during interrogations and that he personally murdered hundreds of non-combatants. However, after his 15 minutes of fame, he was exposed as a fraud who never served in Iraq and was kicked out of basic training. Also present in force, was Americans Against Escalation in Iraq a multi-million dollar umbrella antiwar organization, which claims to represent 9 million activists. With abundant funding they are hiring hundreds of organizers and lobbyists to execute a program called Iraq Summer "to help fracture critical elements of the Republican base of support for the war by early fall," which is analogous to the Vietnam Summer project that helped end the Vietnam War.

However, the reality on the ground is different than the perception that journalists and politicians, swayed by antiwar pressure, like to believe. The troop surge is showing early signs of success according to recent testimony of top generals in Iraq. General W. E. Gaskin, Multinational Forces West Commanding General, reported at a July 20th CSPAN Pentagon Press Briefing, attended by as few as 10 journalists, an optimistic picture of previously anti-American Sunni Sheikhs and Arab tribesmen of al Anbar Province coming on board to fight al Queda alongside U.S. troops.

Unless you were up late watching C-SPAN, you probably wont hear this upbeat report on turning the tide in al Anbar, so I’ll summarize it here. With al Queda fleeing to neighboring Diyala Province, Anbar which covers 1/3 of Iraq, is showing great progress in developing a self sufficient Iraqi Security Force. Now al Queda terrorists are being pursued relentlessly in Diyala by thousands of U.S. and Iraqi troops. The Petraeus surge doctrine, which replaces the Rumsfeld doctrine of striking and retreating from large secure bases, allows a persistent presence to prevent al Queda from regrouping and returning as the Iraqi security forces have the time to train in counterinsurgency. They are tired of the violence, they want the rule of law, they have the heart, the will, and al Anbar residents are sending their sons to join the police force. All they need is the time, the training and the experience. The military answer is that you can’t buy this experience on the fly and this strategy will take a few years to be fully effective before we can see a draw down.

New York Post reported General Peter Pace’s positive assessment of the initial stages of the troop surge and was quoted as saying: “what I'm hearing now is a sea change that is taking place.” There were 157 roadside bomb attacks in February in Ramadi when the surge strategy began there and now that al Queda has been pushed out, there hasn’t been a single roadside bomb attack in more than two months.

Wade Zirkle, a double tour Iraq War Veteran and Marine Lieutenant, is one of the founders of VFF. Last Thursday evening we were treated to a talk about his organization and its mission at the New York Young Republican Club meeting at the Soldiers, Sailors, Marines and Airmen’s Club in Manhattan.

We heard the inside story that our soldiers understand their mission in Iraq and are resolute in their determination to win against al Queda-in-Iraq, the epicenter of the radical Islamic enemy of the West. Those with boots on the ground understand that withdrawal is not an option, more than the armchair generals in Washington who believe the over-hyped Sunni-Shiite civil war scenario.

Politicians from Washington who are more interested in the future of their political careers than the future of our national security, are sabotaging a war on the cusp of victory. The media has blinded the American public by reporting tragic news of suicide bombings and carnage from the safety of the Green Zone. The generals who are running the war don’t have the guts to kick the ubiquitous media out of Iraq, since reporters have been giving away secrets to the enemy and leveling false charges against our brave Marines. Our fundamental freedom of the press exists for the institutions in the U.S. and does not apply to a war zone where embedded reporters are a liability, not an asset to the mission. If General Patton or Norman Schwarzkopf were running this war, they would throw the journalists out by the seat of their pants and let them return later to report on the victory. U.S. Generals should never have to sweat and cower before TV cameramen and microphones. Televised wars will be lost before they can be won as we experienced the Vietnam War in our living rooms. We need to support the critical mission of VFF to mobilize veterans to spread the message of victory to the media, to Capitol Hill and to our campuses. If we fail to do so now, we may see another Vietnam Summer as the war in Iraq will be lost before it can be won.

Veterans of Iraq or Afghanistan, who want to participate in a “troop surge” on Washington in September when General Petraeus will testify before Congress, can send an email to veteran@vetsforfreedom.org. The rest of us who want to support the mission should go to the Vets for Freedom website and sign up or donate.

Thomas Lipscomb, veteran investigative journalist and publisher, who has debunked many a canard, looks askance at both The New Republic’s gullible inking of absurd invented charges against American forces in Iraq and at the lack of depth in the Weekly Standard’s skepticism.

Lipscomb wrote to the Washington Post’s media columnist, Howard Kurtz, who couldn’t make heads nor tails out of the matter. Lipscomb wonders where are any military veterans among these titans of journalism, who could directly and immediately see through the absurdity of the TNR piece and provide immediate truth.

For that matter, why not let their fingers do the walking, right to the Pentagon, and ask the operator to connect them with someone with military experience. Instead, days pass, until a blogger -- a Marine Reservist and a student at Columbia University in New York City, presently in Iraq interviewing the troops -- gets a Public Affairs officer in Iraq to reply courteously that the TNR piece is BS.

As Lipscomb says, this isn’t about politics; it’s Journalism 101.

Below, Lipscomb’s email to Howard Kurtz:

Looks like The New Republic has been had again. And this time it is so obvious it is embarrassing.

Of course with journalists today being the gentle allergic-to-combat darlings they are on both left and right... they can't be expected to know something as simple as there ARE no "square back" 9mm cartridges... or that anyone who tries cute tricks like the "diarist" describes with a Bradley has a very good chance of flipping his vehicle like a turtle exposing his lightly armored belly or leaving himself an immobile target in enemy country.

And BTW there is a crew aboard this Bradley with him that is not really interested in taking those kinds of risks with the putative "private"

Not really a situation to "enjoy" now... is it?

Perhaps instead of trying get this kind of crap "fact-checked, to the extent possible" (whatever that means) some of these publications could actually take advantage of some expertise available right in their hometown in DC... It is just a local call away.

Many journalists use it all the time. It is called the Department of Defense.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Here is some background on my own military experience:

As a 1203-1204 MOS Armor officer I know a little bit about armored vehicles and I climbed in my first Bradley back in the Fulda Gap in Germany before the Berlin Wall came down.

As a former captain of an Army pistol team as well… I also know more than a little about 9 mm rounds. And there are a lot of reasons why 1) round cartridges which allow equal pressure of the expanding gases in all directions cause fewer jammed weapons and 2) The military is trying as hard as it can to get rid of cartridges all together.

NO ONE wants to screw around with SQUARE cartridges that are far more likely to jam in combat than the ones that already cause enough grief. We learned the hard way with the early models of the M-16 in Viet Nam. We found too many dead soldiers and marines with their rifles partially disassembled to clear an ammunition blockage.

Of course who would EVER expect a New Republic editor or a Weekly Standard editor to check with the Infantry School at Benning or the Armor School at Knox… or the Ordnance testing ground right there in Maryland which are responsible for the capabilities and adoption of weapons systems, when they could “fact check” with Google… or Wikipedia for that matter?

KEEP ON THIS HOWIE… it will be fun… Happy to get you some experts if you wish… .

Where do they GET these kids? Doesn’t anyone know how to report and fact check a source with stories too good to be true anymore?

Lipscomb adds:

Franklin Foer, the editor of The New Republic is so gaga about his pseudonymous “Scott Thomas” that he calls him “an amazing resource—a guy who’s on the front lines, who has a gift for observation and can write,” which may well be true. What is clear from the current controversy is that “Thomas” is a lousy reporter, and Foer’s notion that he had Thomas’s work “"fact-checked, to the extent possible" is either a lie or a confession of terminal incompetence by Foer.

However “amazing” Thomas is as a “resource” he is also clearly “incredible” as well. And if Foer had done the most elementary fact-checking on the details of Thomas’s reporting with military experts, rather than Thomas’s buddies, he would never have run the piece currently under fire. Clearly the current Editor of The New Republic doesn’t know beans about how to authenticate the work of his writers… Marty Peretz should give his revolving door over there one more spin and fast.

Meanwhile, The Weekly Standard is full of indignant blather from Editor Bill Kristol, but fails to do a thing to advance the story or blow it by having it gone over by its own experts. Here is an obvious target…as recounted in the Howard Kurtz column today: “The diarist described how soldiers in a mess hall had openly mocked a woman -- he wasn't sure whether she was a soldier or contractor -- whose face was severely scarred from an injury presumably suffered in Iraq: "The disfigured woman slammed her cup down and ran out of the chow hall, her half-finished tray of food nearly falling to the ground."

The fact is that the military today is almost as infested with “politically correct” monitoring as an Ivy League college. That incident would not have gone unnoticed or unreported by commissioned or noncommissioned officers and it would have occasioned a pile of paperwork. This incident could in no way be regarded as a normal event in a mess hall with hundreds of people present, any number of whom spend their nights worrying that they too might be horribly disfigured in Iraq.

Making jokes about the disfigurement of a man, or particularly a woman, in a mess hall is about as unlikely an event as might be imagined, as Scott Johnson correctly noted in Powerline. There would have been a paper trail with a lot of asses to cover and if Foer had the mess hall identified correctly, this would have been an easy thing to authenticate.

The Weekly Standard contents itself with a blog posting from a PAO officer at Falcon Base in Iraq, where the offense supposedly took place. It simply passes on this official communication and does no work on its own.

The inanity of the reporting continued in Kurtz’s noting of an American Spectator staffer, Jeff Tabin, who wrote Kurtz “I’ve googled in vain for evidence of [a] 9mm cartridge that features ‘a square back.’”

Great!... The New Republic can’t fact-check, The Weekly Standard can flounce indignantly, but it doesn’t do any fact-checking either, and now The American Spectator employs a staffer who likes to get his name in the papers who thinks fact-checking in looking something up on Google.

With the policy question of American involvement in Iraq squarely on the table, this is the kind of reporting we are supposed to rely upon? Is it any wonder that periodical circulation is collapsing and advertising is drying up?

AND:
Seems TIME magazine can't tell the diff between a Russian and U.S. helicopter.

Yesterday’s sentencing in the court martial of Marine Lance Corporal Trent Thomas will leave some with strong views unsatisfied.

Thomas was found guilty of kidnapping and conspiracy but not of premeditated murder; sentenced to bad-conduct discharge, busting to private, and time-served (519-days) but no further imprisonment. (Summary of case at Jurist)

The verdict and sentencing neither vindicates his actions, nor condemns the U.S. and its military. Instead, through a trial by peers – Iraq combat veterans, Thomas’ actions appear considered in light of mitigating circumstances.

The unit was constructed and instructed to be more aggressive. Thomas may have experienced some diminished capacity. It wasn’t even clear whether the Iraqi murdered was an enemy supporter or combatant.

On the other hand, it seems clear that the squad acted independently of higher command, and outside the rules of combat.

In the end, justice appears served.

Former Marine attorney and judge Gary Solis said after the sentencing that juries often play the role of softening verdicts --- or toughening them up --- through sentencing.

"Juries have always been society's avenging sword or the means by which society softens the rough edges of the law," Solis said in a telephone interview Friday morning. Now a professor of military law and Washington's Georgetown University, Solis said the sentence sent a message that "we can't have this conduct, so you're gone," but at the same time that the panel was sympathetic to the case.

Further trials are scheduled for others, including more senior, which may have differing outcomes, depending on facts and circumstances -- as justice should.

Britain’s Daily Mail carries a review -- "The Genocide Generals" -- of a book, Tapping Hitler’s Generals, formerly secret tapings of captured German generals discussing, they thought privately among themselves, their knowledge of the holocaust atrocities.

[The tapes] explode the post-war claim of the Wehrmacht that they did not know what the SS were doing to the Jews, Slavs, mentally disabled and others among what they termed "untermensch" (sub-humans)….

Attempts to suggest that genocide was solely the responsibility of the SS and Nazi fanatics, and not widespread across the whole Wehrmacht, completely collapse before the evidence of these recordings.

Although most of the generals at Trent Park were captured in North Africa, Italy and France, it is clear they knew perfectly well what was happening throughout the Third Reich and its occupied territories….

To make it all the more powerful, the evidence for this comes not from the prosecution, or from "victors' justice" as it is sometimes accused of being.

Instead, out of their own mouths, they are condemned before the bar of history.

The Daily Mail article has grisly details. [HT: Merv Benson, Vietnam veteran, former general counsel to public corporations]

Scholars have discussed for over 60-years why Allied air forces didn’t target the concentration camps. Most simply, there were deemed other strategic or tactical priorities. In other words, the lives of those in the camps were near the bottom of the totem pole of concerns.

We don’t have to wait over 60-years to hear tapings of U.S. Senators who think lightly of genocide or that it shouldn’t be a U.S. priority.

Senator Barack Obama, interviewed by Associated Press, believes, “"There's no doubt there are risks of increased bloodshed in Iraq without a continuing U.S. presence there," in Iraq. Nonetheless, Obama says, according to AP, “preventing a potential genocide in Iraq isn't a good enough reason to keep U.S. forces there.” For that matter, Obama doesn’t believe the U.S. should intervene militarily in Darfur.