More Attorneys Flocking to Animal Law

Back in March when a British woman tried to get an Austrian court to declare her the legal guardian of a gorilla, I read a lot of comments from people wondering how far this would go.

Animal rights activists want nothing short of courts declaring animals to have the same rights as humans. Personally, I think it would be a tragic irony if animals wind up with more rights than human babies en utero, but that's another subject for another day.

I read at law.com that more U.S. attorneys are choosing animal law as a practice. The story doesn't really go into what these attorneys are doing, what sorts of cases they handle, and what, if any, changes to the law they are seeing. But if you go to the Animal Legal Defense Fund website, you will have a better idea of the sorts of things they do.

Forcing meat producers to follow the law, for instance, is an excellent purpose (after reading The Omnivore's Dilemma, I'm particularly concerned about pigs). ALDF also deals with growing concerns like who gets the cat in a divorce and how to provide for your pet in your will.

Animal rights is a very fast changing area of law. For instance, when I was in law school, we were taught that you couldn't leave money to your pet--ever. But now, it seems, more states are recognizing trusts set up for the care of pets.

This is an interesting use of legal knowledge, in my opinion. With so many people not having children, more people are treating their pets, unfortunately, the way they once would have treated offspring. And while I disagree with spending more on your dog than a normal person spends on children, protecting animals from cruelty is a good idea.

Terrible Arguments from the Left

I was going to write a post about the truly horrible argumentation techniques on display at Echidne of the Snakes' site. Now, Dana must have read my mind, because he wrote about the completely phony-baloney argument techniques of Amanda Marcotte.

While I'm anxious to comment on the ridiculous post by Amanda, I'll start with the Echidne post first.

The post "American Life League and Poverty" isn't terrible in and of itself. It's more of the typical "abortion is the only cure for poverty" argument you see a lot on liberal blogs (particularly feminist ones). One terrible argumentation technique used by the left is to find a fringe organization and then plaster all persons with a belief as being just like that.

American Life League believes in no abortions. None. Not for health, life, incest, rape, or any of the other sorts of hard exceptions most Americans agree with. Naturally, Echidne (and Jill at feministe) take the extreme position of American Life League and plaster all pro-life supporters with it. I'm a little surprised there wasn't a reference to wanting to bomb abortion clinics. After all, Echidne claims "the extreme fringe of the Republican party does offer more legitimization to misogyny".

What interested me about the post today wasn't so much the post itself. It's more of the usual yadda yadda yadda pro-lifers-want-to-kill-women meme that's quite prevalent on the left. No, what interested me was the comments to this post.

A few excerpts:

--In the past, the people (so, so family orientated) who advocated these policies made sure that women were locked up, hidden away and deprived of their children for getting pregnant.

--If a woman choose (sic) to have sex, then chooses an abortion for whichever reasons she so chooses, that’s OK by me. Nor do I pretend that abortion is something other than it is – a choice to end a pregnancy and possible future life.

--Anything that interferes with a woman's right to choose should be as illegal as it is immoral.

But the comments got uglier quickly. What I noticed is that pro-abortion supporters end up with three arguments, two of which are based on the idea that if one is pro-life, one is a hypocrite.

1. You can't be pro-life and for the death penalty.

And

2. You can't be pro-life unless you want to adopt every child waiting for adoption.

Both arguments were on display at Echidne's site.

--you seem to be implying that you're "pro-life". Does this mean you're against the death penalty and against the invasion if Iraq? Or are you a hypocrite?

--If anti-choicer's walked their talk, there should be zero children awaiting adoption because they would have been snapped up immediately if not sooner by the anti-choice zealots. Until every child is wanted and loved and not in languishing in poverty, the anti-choicer's glib slogans ring hollow.

--People like you give Christians a bad name. When I tell people I'm a Christian I have to specify that I'm not one of the fake ones like you. I was just stating facts. It's not name-calling when it's the truth.

You get that? If you are pro-life but support the death penalty, you are a hypocrite, and if you don't adopt every available child, you can't be pro-life. Occasionally, I link to this site which discusses logical fallacies, most of which are plainly on display during any "debate" (I use the term loosely) with liberals.

In the above quoted examples, we have argumentum ad hominem, dicto simpliciter, red herring, slippery slope, and straw man on display. The arguments spun out of control after some poor guy asked what an "economic hardship" was. Having read enough feminist blogs, I can assure you that an "economic hardship" is whatever the woman decides it is at the time she wants to get her abortion.

The third argument used by pro-abortion supporters is the long, involved, agonizing hypothetical.

--If the choice of abortion is not up to the woman and her physician, sansort, then whe gets to say? If I find out I'm pregnant tomorrow, to whom do I need to go make my justifications? What level of risk is adequate for me to be allowed to not have a third child? Is a 10% chance of death sufficient, or does it have to be 30%? How about if I just go blind? Is needing to sell our house and move to an apartment, sufficient? Or is that just convenience? Does it make a difference that we'd have to move out of the only school district that gives adequate PT and OT to our youngest, or is he just screwed?

--What is your opinion in the recent case of a 9 year old child, just starting the onset of puberty (not that rare now), who was raped by her abusive father and made pregnant?

What about women who are even now being forced to work on the streets and kept obedient with a forced drug addiction? Can you say that they "chose" to have sex? Shouldn't they have the choice to abort rather than possibly suffer a painful and traumatic miscarriage due to drug-induced complications or a particularly aggressive beating? Or giving birth to a child that would be addicted to drugs and possibly suffering, from birth, from any number of serious STDs?

How about this- I live with my partner. We have been together for almost 5 years and intend to spend our lives together. Due to personal issues which both of us have suffered we do not, ever, want to have children. Not ever. We use contraception, obviously, and are very careful. My partner has asked doctors for a vasectomy but, because he's only 25, they won't operate. Neither will they let me tie my tubes. If I get pregnant, why shouldn't I have the right to have an abortion? I don't want to have one, I would never want to be faced with that choice. But I should have the right to, since I apparently don't have the right to end my own fertility. Oh, and we're on minimum wage, in massive debt and regularly go 2-3 days without eating in the run-up to payday. So yes, poverty DOES still exist in the Western world. We couldn't afford childcare, nor could we afford for one of us to quit work to care for a child.

The reason people like to make up hypotheticals is that they are virtually impossible to answer because the person asked is at the disadvantage of not having all the information necessary to make a decision. In the examples given above, for instance, the commenter unreasonably assumes that all things are static and that the birth of a child wouldn't be added incentive to do better for oneself. Nor does it acknowledge the fact that no one will remain the same age forever, or that the people involved have already determined that pregnancy is an acceptable risk (they choose to have sex, after all).

If I were still allowed to comment (I am, after all, banned), I would ask these same people at what point a woman's right to choose gives way to the child's (or fetus', if you will) right to life? After all, in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the court explained that there is, indeed, a point when potential life takes priority over convenience. I wouldn't expect these hard-liners to answer. Their belief is that the right to abort one's offspring is absolute; there's never a time in their way of thinking where the child is more significant than an appendix (and, yes, I've seen this argument before).

At least I don't accuse them of lying about their own motivations as does Amanda Marcotte.

As I’ve mentioned a gazillion times before, the main obstacle with debating a lot of conservatives is that most conservatives rely on so many bad faith arguments. So you’re not really arguing about ideology, but end up mostly trying to get them to admit to come out and argue their actual position. To make it even more complex, while the conservative talking points that get passed around are created in bad faith, they do tend to get their hooks into people who are too dumb or scared to look deeper and find out that their own opinions that have been handed to them by conservative media have been created in bad faith.

That’s the central issue in the “but some anti-choicers really do think they care about babies!” non-starter of a debate. Yes, some people in non-leadership roles have convinced themselves of their own bullshit, but that doesn’t obligate anyone to play along with it. In fact, as many people here and on other feminist boards will tell you, they used to be “pro-life”, and the only way they started to shift their opinions was to have someone call out the anti-woman, anti-sex agenda of the anti-choice movement until they had to admit that they were participating in a bad faith movement.

As I pointed out at CSPT, Amanda not only argues that conservatives don't mean what they argue (but have "pernicious motives" for opposing something), but that they are too stupid to know that they don't mean it and need liberals to point out their racist, sexist, homophobic motivations. Naturally, this line of bullshit was well received at Pandagon, where conservatives are constantly accused of hatred towards (pick your group) and stupidity in what they believe.

What the examples from Echidne's commenters and Amanda's post show is how weak the arguments of our liberal friends are. But don't expect that to stop them. But what's a little petitio principii between "friends"?

UPDATE: More of that "nuance" and "understanding" the left are so well known for from the Echidne comments:

i think the only way to argue with the "abortion = murder" position in such a way as to not go insane, is to respond: "i know you don't really believe that - you just think that women don't know what's best for them and should be controlled by men." because that IS what every "abortion = murder" person i have ever talked to believes. then again, i have no idea how to argue that point with those people either.

Because, once again, the "abortion at all costs" crowd knows all pro-life supporters think women should be controlled by men. Golden! You can't make this stuff up.

Scary, But It Isn't Even Halloween

This L.A. Times column sent chills down my spine.

THE hem of my heavy Islamic cloak trailed over floors that glistened like ice. I walked faster, my eyes fixed on a familiar, green icon. I hadn't seen a Starbucks in months, but there it was, tucked into a corner of a fancy shopping mall in the Saudi capital. After all those bitter little cups of sludgy Arabic coffee, here at last was an improbable snippet of home — caffeinated, comforting, American.

I wandered into the shop, filling my lungs with the rich wafts of coffee. The man behind the counter gave me a bemused look; his eyes flickered. I asked for a latte. He shrugged, the milk steamer whined, and he handed over the brimming paper cup. I turned my back on his uneasy face.

Crossing the cafe, I felt the hard stares of Saudi men. A few of them stopped talking as I walked by and watched me pass. Them, too, I ignored. Finally, coffee in hand, I sank into the sumptuous lap of an overstuffed armchair.

"Excuse me," hissed the voice in my ear. "You can't sit here." The man from the counter had appeared at my elbow. He was glaring.

"Excuse me?" I blinked a few times.

"Emmm," he drew his discomfort into a long syllable, his brows knitted. "You cannot stay here."

"What? Uh … why?"

Then he said it: "Men only."

He didn't tell me what I would learn later: Starbucks had another, unmarked door around back that led to a smaller espresso bar, and a handful of tables smothered by curtains. That was the "family" section. As a woman, that's where I belonged. I had no right to mix with male customers or sit in plain view of passing shoppers. Like the segregated South of a bygone United States, today's Saudi Arabia shunts half the population into separate, inferior and usually invisible spaces.

At that moment, there was only one thing to do. I stood up. From the depths of armchairs, men in their white robes and red-checked kaffiyehs stared impassively over their mugs. I felt blood rushing to my face. I dropped my eyes, and immediately wished I hadn't. Snatching up the skirts of my robe to keep from stumbling, I walked out of the store and into the clatter of the shopping mall.

The author, Megan Stack, writes a gripping article of her experiences in Saudi Arabia, one of the most oppressive regimes towards women.

Like most American adults, I take my freedom to go where I want and do what I please for granted. I cannot imagine being forced to hide myself under a blanket with holes in it, have to use only certain entrances, and never go anywhere alone. With three kids, one of the things I prize are those times where I get to go out alone to shop, read, or just think. Living in a world that despised my existence (for that's what the Saudis do) would be damaging psychologically, and, from Stack's description, physically, as well.

The sleeves, the length of it, always felt foreign, at first. But it never took long to work its alchemy, to plant the insecurity. After a day or two, the notion of appearing without the robe felt shocking. Stripped of the layers of curve-smothering cloth, my ordinary clothes suddenly felt revealing, even garish. To me, the abaya implied that a woman's body is a distraction and an interruption, a thing that must be hidden from view lest it haul the society into vice and disarray. The simple act of wearing the robe implanted that self-consciousness by osmosis.

In the depths of the robe, my posture suffered. I'd draw myself in and bumble along like those adolescent girls who seem to think they can roll their breasts back into their bodies if they curve their spines far enough. That was why, it hit me one day, I always seemed to come back from Saudi Arabia with a backache.

I won't excerpt from the rest of the article, but it is riveting. Anyone not outraged at the treatment of women needs to read this to discover the terrible toll Saudi policies take on women. Our government should do more to pressure the sheiks for equal rights.

Why Apologize?

Some Arkansas lawmakers want the state to apologize for slavery.

Granted, slavery's been outlawed for 142 years, but I guess that's not enough for some people (mostly Democrats pandering for a few votes).

I've never understood the point of the pro-apology movement. Any state apologizing for slavery won't change anything. We had a war and many men lost their lives to do away with slavery. It seems to me that that's enough.

What's next? Are these same people interested in apologizing for endorsing coverture for so long?

I agree with the head of the Arkansas Black Caucus, Senator Irma Hunter Brown.

"Race relations and the ability of people to get along is based upon deeds more than it is words and we'll be judged by how we treat one another. That's how we should be judged."

Let's spend more time worrying about behavior than silly, grandstanding P.R. events.

Libby Sentenced to 2 1/2 Years

I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby was sentenced to 2 1/2 years in prison yesterday after being found guilty of lying to the grand jury and obstructing justice in the CIA leak case that produced no one guilty of leaking anything.

While it seems a bit harsh that Libby should spend 2 1/2 years in prison, lying under oath is still one of the most punishable offenses in the judicial system. Just ask Bill Clinton, who was disbarred for it.

Of course, that's not what the story I linked to says. It says Libby is the highest ranking government official to be convicted since the Iran-Contra affair, another idiotic probe. Funny how they skip over Clinton's disbarrment, eh?

William Kristol at The Weekly Standard bitterly denounces the Bush administration's announcement that it will not comment on the case until the appeals process is over. That could take longer than President Bush has left in office, and Judge Reggie Walton seems to be unwilling to leave Libby out of prison while he appeals that conviction. Is this another case where President Bush is going to ignore the base?

Jeff Goldstein explains why the media treat Libby so badly but ignored Sandy "Socks" Berger.

For months and months now we’ve been hearing that the Libby trial was about the dangers of the “powerful” covering up their secrets—that Plame’s “outing” could actually jeopardize national security, and other self-righteous, hyperbolic, and patently absurd justifications for pushing forward in the hope of grabbing a Republican scalp.

Meanwhile, right here in front of us, we have a case where Sandy Berger, a former National Security Advisor, has voluntarily surrendered his law license rather than come clean about what documents he destroyed, why he destroyed them, and who he was trying to protect in doing so.

When I begin to hear the same people who’ve been braying for Libby’s blood take similar aim at Berger—and by all rights, their animus should be even more concentrated, given Berger’s position and power, and given the nature of his crime, which involved the pilfering and destruction of classified documents—I’ll take their defenses of the Libby show trial more seriously.

It will be a long wait. They are too busy still trying to claim that Plame was covert.

Court Rules Against F.C.C. on Indecency Fines

In a blow for families, a federal appeals court panel has struck down the government policy that allows for fines to stations and networks that broadcast obscene utterances.

The specific ruling concerns "fleeting expletives," specifically a vulgarity spoken by U2's Bono during a 2003 Golden Globes ceremony.

But the judges said vulgar words are just as often used out of frustration or excitement, and not to convey any broader obscene meaning. “In recent times even the top leaders of our government have used variants of these expletives in a manner that no reasonable person would believe referenced sexual or excretory organs or activities.”

Adopting an argument made by lawyers for NBC, the judges then cited examples in which Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney had used the same language that would be penalized under the policy. Mr. Bush was caught on videotape last July using a common vulgarity that the commission finds objectionable in a conversation with Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain. Three years ago, Mr. Cheney was widely reported to have muttered an angry obscene version of “get lost” to Senator Patrick Leahy on the floor of the United States Senate.

Of course, the difference is that neither the President nor the Vice President spoke on television during prime time into the microphone, knowingly using vulgarities that millions of people would see.

This is, frankly, an atrocious decision. The "everybody's doing it" argument didn't work with my mother, but I'll play Mom for a minute and explain. Just because "everybody does something" doesn't mean society doesn't have a right or an expectation that certain behavior is unacceptable. After all "everybody" doesn't wear seatbelts but we still have laws against it.

Personally, I liked the stricter standard for broadcast, even though I don't watch that much television. I don't particularly like having to explain to my small children why some jerk on TV gets to say words that they would get in trouble for.

CBO Says Immigration Bill Won't Stop Illegal Immigration

Not that anyone should be surprised, but, according to the Congressional Budget Office, the Senate's bill will only cut illegal immigration by about 25%.

The bill's new guest-worker program could lead to at least 500,000 more illegal immigrants within a decade, said the report from the CBO, which said in its official cost estimate that it assumes some future temporary workers will overstay their time in the plan, adding up to a half-million by 2017 and 1 million by 2027...

And in a blow to President Bush's timetable, the CBO said the "triggers" -- setting up the verification system, deploying 20,000 U.S. Border Patrol agents to duty and constructing hundreds of miles of fencing and vehicle barriers -- won't be met until 2010.

Those triggers must be met before the temporary worker program could begin, and Mr. Bush had hoped to have them completed about the time he leaves office in January 2009.

Border enforcement first. Amnesty afterwards.

William Jefferson Indicted

Democrat William Jefferson was indicted today on charges of racketeering, money-laundering and soliciting more than $400,000 in bribes in connection with years of trying to broker business deals in Africa.

The charges came almost two years after investigators raided Jefferson's home in Washington and found $90,000 in cash stuffed in a box in his freezer.

The indictment in federal court in Alexandria, Va., lists 16 alleged violations with prison terms totaling as much as 235 years. Jefferson is charged with racketeering, soliciting bribes, wire fraud, money laundering, obstruction of justice and conspiracy.

He is the first sitting congressman to face charges under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which prohibits corporate bribery overseas. Jefferson is to be arraigned Friday in U.S. District Court in Alexandria.

Jefferson is accused of soliciting bribes from 11 different companies for himself and his family, and also of bribing a Nigerian official. The scheme was complicated and Jefferson set up a front company to hide the money, prosecutors said.

"But the essence of the charges are really very simple: Mr. Jefferson corruptly traded on his good office and on the Congress," said Chuck Rosenberg, the U.S. attorney for eastern Virginia.

Yorkshire at Common Sense Political Thought asks when Jefferson will resign from Congress, since Tom DeLay resigned after indictment.

My guess is about two years from never. Contrary to this laughable assertion at the Carpetbagger Report, Democrats never resign, no matter what sort of charges they face.

I mean, do I really need to link to this site again to show the depth and variety of corruption within the Democratic Party? I wrote quite a while ago about the corruption of the Democratic Party. Is it really asking too much to expect a Democrat mouthpiece on the internet to be honest?

UPDATE: House Minority Leader John Boehner is trying to get Jefferson expelled from the House, following ethics rules.

The Republican leader will ask members of the House to vote on a resolution requiring the ethics committee to review the indictment filed against him in order to seek his expulsion from the House, according to his office.

Boehner will offer a privileged resolution on the House floor as early as Tuesday calling for the House Committee on Standards of Official Conduct to review the 94-page indictment filed against Jefferson Monday. The House will then vote on his resolution calling for the ethics panel to act.

Those "Undocumented Workers" Are Actually College Students!

Really!

At 23, Mariana should be carefree. She is finishing up her undergraduate degree at the University of California, Los Angeles, and has been accepted to a master's program at Harvard University's education school.

But life is not so simple for Mariana, who insisted that only her first name be published because she is illegally in the United States and worries she could be deported to Guatemala, where she was born.

"I'm even afraid of eating an apple in the library because I'm afraid of getting caught," she said.

Mariana also worries about how she will pay her tuition and what kind of work she will get after she completes school. "What happens next? Without a work permit, how do you exercise your degree?" she said during a recent interview.

Mariana is among an estimated 50,000 undocumented students in U.S. colleges today. These students would be among the people who would benefit from a part of an immigration bill that the Senate plans to resume work on this week.

Poor Mariana. She's only one person in 50,000 who is here illegally. But she's really, really smart and might find a cure for cancer someday if we'd only let her stay!

The article goes on in a very sympathetic vein, explaining how Mariana and others like her didn't make the choice to come to America illegally. They were brought here by their parents and, for some of them, this is the only home they've ever known.

I'm sympathetic, too. If we were only talking about 50,000 people--people who are well-educated and most likely to become tax-paying, law-abiding, grass-mowing-and-edging citizens--then more people might be supportive of them. The problem is that 50,000 is a tiny subset of the 12 million estimated illegal aliens in this country. And the vast majority of those illegal aliens aren't eating apples in college libraries, studying medicine or pre-law; they are low-skilled, uneducated people whose primary interest in being in the U.S. is to earn money to send home to family members. In short, they are here because this is where the money is, not because they are interested in being American citizens.

One of the arguments I see frequently by pro-illegal immigration crowds is the idea that "we were all immigrants once." Indeed, my own mother was an immigrant. The difference is that most of those people came here to contribute to this country and embraced it. But the illegal immigrants of today are economic immigrants. Their interest is in making what they can to support people somewhere else. There's nothing wrong with that; it's a fact of life.

What I don't like is the attempt by pro-illegal immigration types to highlight people most likely to get sympathy, like college students. It would be one thing if Mariana was your typical illegal alien. Instead, she's just a tiny fraction of the millions of illegals we have.

Haloscan

I just added Haloscan in answer to a suggestion from a commenter. I hope it works right (I'm not very technically minded) and that it is helpful to everybody. Enjoy! :)

Dems Think Their Rules Are for Others

I'm not surprised to read that, after campaigning against earmarks--also known as pork--Democrats are ducking the very rules implemented to identify them.

After promising unprecedented openness regarding Congress' pork barrel practices, House Democrats are moving in the opposite direction as they draw up spending bills for the upcoming budget year.

Democrats are sidestepping rules approved their first day in power in January to clearly identify "earmarks" — lawmakers' requests for specific projects and contracts for their states.

Rather than including specific pet projects, grants and contracts in legislation as it is being written, Democrats are following an order by the House Appropriations Committee chairman to keep the bills free of such earmarks until it is too late for critics to effectively challenge them.

Rep. David Obey, D-Wis., says those requests for dams, community grants and research contracts for favored universities or hospitals will be added to spending measures in the fall. That is when House and Senate negotiators assemble final bills.

Such requests total billions of dollars.

As a result, most lawmakers will not get a chance to oppose specific projects as wasteful or questionable when the spending bills for various agencies get their first votes in the full House in June.

I'm not sure why anyone would be surprised at this. Politicians know that bringing home the bacon is what gets them re-elected. What is surprising is that Democrats aren't willing to highlight the pork they want the rest of us to pay for.

This Is My Father's World

It's thunderstorming heavily here this morning. I love thunderstorms, but this one woke me up and frightened the kiddoes! That's loud!

One of my favorite hymns is This Is My Father's World, and it seems appropriate on a morning with loud, dramatic storms. It became one of my favorites during the time my mother was sick, just a week or so before her death. There are times when so little seems to be under our control. It's nice to know we can have confidence that He is always in control.

This is my Father's world,
and to my listening ears
all nature sings, and round me rings
the music of the spheres.
This is my Father's world:
I rest me in the thought
of rocks and trees, of skies and seas;
his hand the wonders wrought.

This is my Father's world,
the birds their carols raise,
the morning light, the lily white,
declare their maker's praise.
This is my Father's world:
he shines in all that's fair;
in the rustling grass I hear him pass;
he speaks to me everywhere.

This is my Father's world.
O let me ne'er forget
that though the wrong seems oft so strong,
God is the ruler yet.
This is my Father's world:
why should my heart be sad?
The Lord is King; let the heavens ring!
God reigns; let the earth be glad!

A Good Thing Nobody Decided He Was Better Off Dead

CNN has this story about a man who fell into a coma in communist Poland and woke up 19 years later in a democratic Poland, complete with market economy.

Wheelchair-bound Jan Grzebski, whom doctors had given only two or three years to live following his 1988 accident, credited his caring wife Gertruda with his revival.

"It was Gertruda that saved me, and I'll never forget it," Grzebski told news channel TVN24.

"For 19 years Mrs. Grzebska did the job of an experienced intensive care team, changing her comatose husband's position every hour to prevent bed-sore infections," Super Express reported Dr. Boguslaw Poniatowski as saying.

"When I went into a coma there was only tea and vinegar in the shops, meat was rationed and huge petrol lines were everywhere," Grzebski told TVN24, describing his recollections of the communist system's economic collapse.

"Now I see people on the streets with cell phones and there are so many goods in the shops it makes my head spin."

Grzebski awoke to find his four children had all married and produced 11 grandchildren during his years in hospital.

Talk about your Rip Van Winkle.

It's a good thing Jan Grzebski had a wife who wanted to take care of him rather than killing him.

New Terror Plot Foiled

Via Yorkshire at Common Sense Political Thought, we find yet another terror plot foiled.

(T)hree people were arrested and one other was being sought Saturday in connection to a plot to blow up jet-fuel lines at John F. Kennedy International Airport, officials said.

Four people have been charged. Three suspects are in custody: Russell Defreitas, Kareem Ibrihim and Abdul Kadir. Another suspect, Abdul Nur is still at large...

Sources said Defreitas, a former cargo worker at JFK allegedly began to plot attacking the US last July or August. Defeitas sought help in carrying out a plan and went to an FBI informant, who gathered information about the plot.

U.S. Attorney Roslynn R. Mauskopf called it "one of the most chilling plots imaginable."

"The devastation that would be caused had this plot succeeded is just unthinkable," she said at a news conference...

In discussing JFK airport as a target, Defreitas exulted over JFK airport’s symbolic importance, according to a U.S. Justice Department complaint:

"Anytime you hit Kennedy, it is the most hurtful thing to the United States. To hit John F. Kennedy, wow .... They love John F. Kennedy like he’s the man .... If you hit that, this whole country will be in mourning. It’s like you can kill the man twice. "

In a later recorded conversation with his coconspirators in May 2007, Defreitas compared the plot to attack JFK airport to the attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, stating, "even the Twin Towers can’t touch it," adding that, "this can destroy the economy of America for some time."

UPDATE: Captain Ed has a link to this story which states the FBI fears these guys have links to "one of the most wanted al Qaeda leaders, Adnan Shukrijumah, known to have operated out of Guyana and Trinidad." I guess the war in Iraq created terrorists in Trinidad now?

Michelle Malkin has an exerpt from the indictment.

NewsBusters wonders when the media will question the timing of the arrests. Oops. I guess the nutroots are already on it.

More Misinformation from Media Matters

I've written before about the disingenuousness of Media Matters (see here and here for starters).

Media Matters likes to tout itself as "balance" to conservative media, ignoring the fact that most MSM is liberal to start with and needed balancing by conservatives. Frequently, MM has been caught cherry-picking quotes or twisting facts to fit its mantra that there's this vast unchecked rightwing takeover of the media.

Via Redstate, we have these Media Matters quotes:

* Combining newspapers and television, conservative religious leaders were quoted, mentioned, or interviewed in news stories 2.8 times as often as were progressive religious leaders.

* On television news -- the three major television networks, the three major cable news channels, and PBS -- conservative religious leaders were quoted, mentioned, or interviewed almost 3.8 times as often as progressive leaders.

* In major newspapers, conservative religious leaders were quoted, mentioned, or interviewed 2.7 times as often as progressive leaders.

According to GetReligion, which was linked to in the Redstate post,

The religious conservatives analyzed were James Dobson, William Donohue, Gary Bauer, Charles Colson, Jerry Falwell, Franklin Graham, Ted Haggard, T.D. Jakes, Richard Land, Tom Minnery, Joel Osteen, Rod Parsley, Tony Perkins, Pat Robertson, Rick Warren and Wendy Wright. The religious liberals analyzed were Tony Campolo, Joan Chittister, Robert Edgar, Jim Forbes Jr., C. Welton Gaddy, Jesse Jackson, Michael Lerner, Brian McLaren, David Saperstein, Al Sharpton, John H. Thomas and Jim Wallis.

As Redstate author Hunter Baker points out, perhaps the reason the first group (conservative) gets quoted more is that the membership of their groups dwarfs that of the second (liberal) one. After all, that's the argument we hear about why NOW, NARAL, and Planned Parenthood get quoted all the time when abortion is the topic.

But Mollie at GetReligion gives us what is really missing from the coverage, and it's not the "statistics" Media Matters wants to use.

Before we get to the journalistic analysis, I must point out how — once again — this study exists in a media environment where politics is everything. Even in religious coverage. Of the 20 folks analyzed, not a single one represents my theological views. None even come close, as a matter of fact. From my perspective, all 20 share a somewhat similar religious viewpoint — not a political one. Their ministries don’t emphasize creeds, the liturgy, forgiveness of sins or sacraments. No, every single one of these people is focused on politics and personal or societal improvement. It supports the views of historian Darryl Hart, who argues that this left-right comparison obscures the fact that political religious types on left and right are two sides of the same coin. If these guys feel they don’t get a fair shake from the media, imagine how those of us feel whose churches are less concerned with politics! We’re invisible!

The survey also fails to highlight one of the greatest wrongs perpetrated against the religious left. There is simply no discussion at all of the theology of the religious left. There’s very little on the right, either. But the absence of coverage of the left’s theological views is just sinful.

Virtually everyone MM studied is looking at moral issues from a political slant: abortion, embryonic stem cell research, fighting poverty, etc. But those two groups don't come close to covering the various beliefs of Christians on any of these issues, primarily because most Christian churches aren't political about their beliefs.

We've stated before (see here) that Democrats and liberals tend to ignore the Christian left until they need their votes. But Mollie points out that journalists also ignore this constituency when they are covering religion.

Perhaps this is another example of media bias, the kind that we don't talk about as much. That is, because journalists agree with views expressed by the Christian left, they tend to focus only on conservative Christian controversies when looking for a story.

Take poverty. Mollie points out that everybody opposes poverty. But the Christian left and Christian right approach the problem with different solutions. The Christian right is more likely to advocate for food banks, voluntary giving, nonprofit shelters and so on. The Christian left is more likely to advocate large government-run bureaucracies to deal with the problem. This creates a controversy in Christianity that we don't typically see reported in the MSM. If Media Matters was really interested in who isn't getting quoted, it would spend its energy search for these voice on issues instead of making up statistics to fit their conspiracies.

KIdney Donation Show a Hoax

I hadn't written about the Dutch game show where sick contestants vie for a kidney transplant. I've been burned previously by blogging about things that turned out not to be true. Once again, the outrageous turns out just to be an elaborate public relations ploy to get more people to donate organs.

Captain Ed discussed the fact that market forces take over in virtually any human situation, and organ donation is no different. The problem is that we've decided to make it different. That is, we've determined that human organs should be donated and not paid for.

This creates a huge supply and demand problem, because most people either don't think about donating their organs or are squeamish about doing so. That leads to rationing, which is why 18 people die per day waiting for a transplant organ.

Lamentably, too many transplant professionals are resigned to rationing. The alternative is to create a larger supply of organs -- and the most likely way to achieve it is through a safe, regulated system in which donors can receive compensation for their organs. The idea of rewarding living donors for a kidney, or their estates if they give an organ after death, has long been taboo. Yet as thousands die every year the idea is being taken more seriously -- and it should be.

A growing number of physicians, legal scholars and ethicists are urging pilot studies of a regulated system with strong donor protections. This would require Congress to amend the 1984 National Organ Transplant Act so people who give organs could receive "valuable consideration." Such consideration could take many forms, perhaps something as simple as offering them lifelong Medicare coverage. This could also serve as a compelling incentive to other prospective donors. Or Congress could grant waivers so that states can implement their own creative incentive ideas, perhaps using tax credits or tuition vouchers.

As one commenter at Captain's Quarters pointed out, everybody else gets compensated for their contribution: the doctor, the nurses, the staff, the hospital. They all get compensated. But not the donor, and sometimes insurance won't even pay for the costs that donor endures.

It may be unseemly to talk about compensating donors (I can see the guests lining up for Jerry Springer now), but there are only two ways of increasing donors: by law and by compensation. We don't want to mandate that people must donate their organs; it would be a strange argument for the pro-abortion crowd to make that bodily integrity is important when wanting to kill one's offspring but not important when considering one's own DNA-bearing organs.

So, we are left with compensating donors. Will this create some scenarios where poor people donate more organs than wealthy ones, thereby "exploiting" the poor. Possibly. And it would certainly put some truth in that urban myth about waking up in a bathtub of ice cubes and finding your kidney gone.

But we compensate people for donating plasma. It seems like the best way to encourage voluntary organ donation is by some compensation for it.

Surprise! Immigration Debate Affects RNC Donations

I've thought for a couple of years that immigration is the issue that splits Republicans. Not spending. Not defense. Not religion. Not education.

I came to this conclusion after I was banned from (what I thought was) a conservative blog for stating that I was against illegal immigration, and that if those in favor really wanted more immigration, then change our laws. I was branded a racist for actually thinking we should enforce our immigration laws, a charge I found bizarre and off target, to say the least.

The truth is, there is a large chunk of the Republican party (and quite a few Democrats, as well) who want us to close our borders to illegal immigrants. We aren't people who are against legal immigration. We may even sympathize and understand why illegals come here (I've seen some fascinating films that help explain the desperation of illegal aliens to come here to work). But nonetheless, we see illegal immigration as a huge blight on this country (particularly if you live in a border state, but also elsewhere) that needs fixing, and amnesty--by any other name--won't do it.

For saying this, our own party has branded us as un-American, racist, and worse. This isn't merely a political discussion about the best way to handle immigration. It's personal.

I've watched in horror and fascination as the immigration legislation currently considered has been making its way through Congress. I've become resigned to the fact that President Bush--who comes from a state with an illegal immigration problem--doesn't seem to care that most of his party wants tougher immigration laws, not more lax ones.

Well, the Republican Party will pay a price for this and it's starting with donations.

The Republican National Committee, hit by a grass-roots donors' rebellion over President Bush's immigration policy, has fired all 65 of its telephone solicitors, Ralph Z. Hallow will report Friday in The Washington Times.

Faced with an estimated 40 percent fall-off in small-donor contributions and aging phone-bank equipment that the RNC said would cost too much to update, Anne Hathaway, the committee's chief of staff, summoned the solicitations staff last week and told them they were out of work, effective immediately, the fired staffers told The Times...

Fired employees acknowledged that the committee's phone equipment was outdated, but said a sharp drop-off in donations "probably" hastened the end of the RNC's in-house phone-bank operation.

"Last year, my solicitations totaled $164,000, and this year the way they were running for the first four months, they would total $100,000 by the end of 2007," said one fired phone bank solicitor who asked not to be identified.

There has been a sharp decline in contributions from RNC phone solicitations, another fired staffer said, reporting that many former donors flatly refuse to give more money to the national party if Mr. Bush and the Senate Republicans insist on supporting what these angry contributors call "amnesty" for illegal aliens.

"Everyone donor in 50 states we reached has been angry, especially in the last month and a half, and for 99 percent of them immigration is the No. 1 issue," said the former employee.

We might not be able to force Congress and the President to do what we want on this or other issues, but we don't have to fund it, either.

Peggy Noonan has a scathing column at OpinionJournal, which sums up the frustration conservatives feel with this administration.

For almost three years, arguably longer, conservative Bush supporters have felt like sufferers of battered wife syndrome. You don't like endless gushing spending, the kind that assumes a high and unstoppable affluence will always exist, and the tax receipts will always flow in? Too bad! You don't like expanding governmental authority and power? Too bad. You think the war was wrong or is wrong? Too bad.

But on immigration it has changed from "Too bad" to "You're bad."

The president has taken to suggesting that opponents of his immigration bill are unpatriotic--they "don't want to do what's right for America." His ally Sen. Lindsey Graham has said, "We're gonna tell the bigots to shut up." On Fox last weekend he vowed to "push back." Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff suggested opponents would prefer illegal immigrants be killed; Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez said those who oppose the bill want "mass deportation." Former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson said those who oppose the bill are "anti-immigrant" and suggested they suffer from "rage" and "national chauvinism."

I frequently note on liberal blogs that the 2006 mid-term elections weren't simply about voters wanting us to leave Iraq; maybe it was about that for Democrats, but the many, many Republicans who either voted for Democrats or didn't vote at all weren't necessarily voting to get out of Iraq. They were tired of the spending spree Congress and the White House had been on for years. They were angry about President Bush's education capitulation to Ted Kennedy. They were angry that, when given the opportunity to nominate a certified conservative to the Supreme Court, President Bush nominated Harriet Miers. In short, enough Republicans said "enough!" to President Bush's policies and to the squandering of power by this administration and Congress.

I've backed President Bush for many, many years, both as governor here in Texas and as president. I have supported the president through 9/11, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq (I still do), and even policies I disagree with but find to be, at least, defensible (education policies). But the immigration debacle is the place I draw the line. I expect Democrats to support amnesty; it works for them by introducing hordes of new government dependents and voters. But conservatives know that rewarding illegal aliens with legal status and/or citizenship simply encourages more illegal immigration.

As much as I hate to admit it, I agree with Noonan when she says:

One of the things I have come to think the past few years is that the Bushes, father and son, though different in many ways, are great wasters of political inheritance. They throw it away as if they'd earned it and could do with it what they liked. Bush senior inherited a vibrant country and a party at peace with itself. He won the leadership of a party that had finally, at great cost, by 1980, fought itself through to unity and come together on shared principles. Mr. Bush won in 1988 by saying he would govern as Reagan had. Yet he did not understand he'd been elected to Reagan's third term. He thought he'd been elected because they liked him. And so he raised taxes, sundered a hard-won coalition, and found himself shocked to lose his party the presidency, and for eight long and consequential years. He had many virtues, but he wasted his inheritance.

Bush the younger came forward, presented himself as a conservative, garnered all the frustrated hopes of his party, turned them into victory, and not nine months later was handed a historical trauma that left his country rallied around him, lifting him, and his party bonded to him. He was disciplined and often daring, but in time he sundered the party that rallied to him, and broke his coalition into pieces. He threw away his inheritance. I do not understand such squandering.

Now conservatives and Republicans are going to have to win back their party. They are going to have to break from those who have already broken from them. This will require courage, serious thinking and an ability to do what psychologists used to call letting go. This will be painful, but it's time. It's more than time.

I only pray that a Republican leader can come forward to reunite conservatives.

UPDATE: Hugh Hewitt has this excellent post on the immigration bill disaster. I listened to much of Hewitt's show yesterday and didn't hear anyone defending this monster. From Hewitt:

At this point I take out my Harriet Miers Fan Club charter membership card and put it on the table: This push for this bill is a disaster, Mr. President. Much much worse than the Miers nomination on which you had many good arguments, or the ports deal, on which you had fewer. On this issue there is no place to stand, and you are asking your friends in the Senate to go down fighting for a bad bill. It is a bad bill because no one believes the government can conduct millions of background checks (many spokesmen for the bill don't even pretend to know where the paperwork will go!). No one believes the bill will halt the next 12 million. No one believes you are going to assure the fence gets built. No one believes that the employer verification system will get done or work when some half-assed version of it does get done. No one believes that the probationary visas don't automatically convert illegal aliens with few if any rights into Due Process Clause covered legal migrants, with a Ninth Circuit ready and waiting to keep them here for decades.

No one believes passing the bill will help catch the jihadist sleepers already in the country. The constituency that has always been with you except on the ports deal --the security voter-- has left the room. If you want them back, act quickly.

Well said.

Bush Envisions Korea-like Role for U.S. in Iraq

It's odd that it has taken President Bush so long to say bluntly that our presence in Iraq should mirror our presence in South Korea. I understood that this would be our role there when the president talked about a long, hard war and that we wouldn't be in and out in a few months.

Stabilizing the Middle East and making it a place habitable for democracy are not goals that can be achieved in 12 months or whatever the timetables desired by Democrats are.

Naturally, the Left doesn't like this comparison at all. In fact, they want to tell you what a horrible place South Korea is.

But Jules Crittenden points out that we've had a presence in South Korea, Germany, and Japan for a total of more than a century, and we don't seem to be inclined to leave those places any time soon. Why isn't the Left more concerned about that, and why do they insist that our presence shouldn't be in a strategic area like Iraq?

And this is our role in the world:

Superpower. Defender of freedom. Promoter of trade. Facilitator of third-world development. Provider of unprecedented and unmatched aid to large parts of the world. Democrats were not always isolationists, and some of their greatest heroes, FDR, HST and JFK, each a stalwart on most if not all of those fronts.

The Middle East has been one of the most problematic regions in the world for decades. A lot of people made a lot of mistakes there, locals and foreigners like us, going way back. It has valuable resources, which invite trouble. The Middle East is not headed anywhere good, nor has it been for some time, thanks to people like Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden and his ilk, the mullahs of Iran, their proxies in Lebanon and Gaza. It needs to be stabilized. This is hard work and will take time. Without our significant involvement, it won’t happen. If you think that our withdrawal from Iraq will result in peace, you are dreaming.

"Socks" Berger Forfeits Law License

Sandy "Socks" Berger has forfeited his law license to avoid embarrassing questions about his classified document theft.

In 2005, Judicial Watch filed a complaint with the Office of Bar Counsel of the District of Columbia Court of Appeals, and the matter was subsequently referred for investigation by the court. After two years, it seems that Berger forfeited his law license because he did not want any more public attention given to his reckless and illegal behavior.

Berger pled guilty in April 2005 to stealing classified documents from the National Archives. The documents concerned the Millenium 2000 bomb plot and the Clinton administration's handling of it.

What was in those documents that Berger needed to cover up so badly he was willing to risk jail time? We'll never know, since Socks destroyed the information he pilfered.

Losing one's law license seems to be de rigeur for the Clinton administration. First, Bill Clinton was disbarred for lying in the Monica Lewinsky scandal, and now we have Socks Berger forfeiting his license for stealing and destroying documents. But remember, theirs was to be the most ethical presidency in history.

Was She Covert or No?

The Agency says yes.

An unclassified summary of outed CIA officer Valerie Plame's employment history at the spy agency, disclosed for the first time today in a court filing by Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald, indicates that Plame was "covert" when her name became public in July 2003.

The summary is part of an attachment to Fitzgerald's memorandum to the court supporting his recommendation that I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Vice President Cheney's former top aide, spend 2-1/2 to 3 years in prison for obstructing the CIA leak investigation...

The unclassified summary of Plame's employment with the CIA at the time that syndicated columnist Robert Novak published her name on July 14, 2003 says, "Ms. Wilson was a covert CIA employee for who the CIA was taking affirmative measures to conceal her intelligence relationship to the United States."

But, as Captain Ed notes, if the Agency truly was trying to keep Plame's identity secret, they were doing a very poor job of it.

Plame drove into the office in Langley. She traveled abroad under her own name. She helped arrange for her husband to do some fact-checking on a sensitive intelligence matter. Her husband, former Ambassador Joe Wilson, then came home and leaked his observations to two nationally-known journalists, and then wrote his own op-ed in the New York Times under his byline.

And her husband managed to list her in Who's Who, where any journalist could look up the entry -- and where Robert Novak did just that.

If that's keeping an agent covert, it speaks volumes about the agency's competence during the George Tenet years.

So now we have confirmation that Plame did get her cover blown. I suppose the only reason that Fitzgerald didn't bother to indict Richard Armitage for the crime was that it would have meant explaining how the CIA tried to hide its NOC asset in plain sight.

The problem, of course, is that had Fitzgerald actually tried to assert that Plame was covert, the defense and the media would have had a field day with the sloppy way "covertness" was handled by the CIA.

We're not talking James Bond, cloak and dagger stuff here. If Plame was driving her car to work daily, used her own name while traveling, and, as Richard Armitage says, "Everybody knew," then either the CIA does a piss poor job protecting its agents identities or Mrs. Wilson was "covert" in name only.

UPDATE: Dan Collins has more at Protein Wisdom.