Right Wing Nut House

For those of you who receive a feed from this site, I have broken down and finally allowed for the publishing of the entire post for each blog entry rather than the first couple of lines.

I have entered into an advertising agreement with a news aggregator who needs to publish my entire article in the feed. Hence, the change.

Don’t know what this will do to traffic. But given that I’ve got around 3,500 Bloglines subscribers alone, I’m hoping it won’t drive visitors away too much.

When I start publishing podcasts of my radio show, I intend to make those available in the feed as well.

Any comments pro or con would be appreciated.

After three years of carping, harping, caterwauling, criticizing, not to mention spinning ever more outrageous and fantastical conspiracy theories about the war, it is time for the Democrats to stand up and do what they say they’ve been sent to Washington to do; get us out of Iraq.

Now is the time we find out whether the Democrats are a bunch of gutless cowards whose political calculations about “supporting the troops but not the mission” has any meaning beyond the sound bite culture of Washington and political campaigns. Now is the time we discover whether Democrats have the courage of their convictions and truly believe that the war is a lost cause, necessitating the immediate withdrawal of our forces.

Not “redeployment” or other weasel words that the Democrats have used in the past in attempting to hide from the gales of history that are blowing ever more fiercely through the Middle East and beyond, but the physical withdrawal of our troops from the fighting. In other words, a halt to combat operations, an admission that the war was not only ill advised, ill considered, and carried out with spectacular incompetence but also that we have lost the conflict and that the terrorists, jihadis, and murderous thugs in the Sunni insurgency have won.

Along with this admission of total failure must come an acknowledgement of success by our enemies. This is the nature of war. One side comes out the winner. The other, a loser. And if the Democrats had any balls at all they would be just as loud and obnoxious when complaining about al-Qaeda’s “victory” against us as they are when complaining about everything else having to do with the war.

They won’t do it, of course, It might lose them a few votes. So despite the fact that they believe the war a failure, that Bush an incompetent fool, that our men are dying needlessly in Iraq, that civilians are being butchered in a lost cause, that there is nothing we can do to stem the tide of victory by al-Qaeda and the jihadis, they will sit back on their over fed, overly ample haunches and kibitz like a bunch of old maids at a bridge game, maintaining a high moral tone while abjectly failing to act in a moral fashion.

For if the Democrats really believed all they say about Iraq - and there should be no doubt that they do - then the only morally defensible position to take is to cut our losses and bring our troops home. Not in 6 months. Not in three months. There should not be one more American soldier who dies or is wounded because of what they see as the illusory notion that there is any kind of victory to be had in Iraq.

But no. The Democrats want to have it both ways. They want an “out” just in case the security situation really does improve as the result of our sending an extra few thousand men to Baghdad. They don’t want Republicans to take political advantage of their moral stance regarding the withdrawal of our troops. They want to be able to claim that they “succeeded” in making Bush change direction in policy - especially if their is a significant improvement in the security situation.

Frankly, I don’t know what they’re so worried about. The chances that an extra 20,000 troops will make a difference in the long run are slight indeed. Three times that many and there may have been a chance to alter the cycle of sectarian violence that now claims far more lives every day than al-Qaeda terrorists or Sunni insurgents. As it stands, the extra troops are little more than a symbolic gesture by the President, a sign to his supporters and the Iraqis that he is still committed to achieving some kind of “victory” - whatever that means.

And lest you think I am any more satisfied with the Administration’s plans than I am with the stance of cowardly Democrats, think again.

The President has been saying for three years that we cannot fail in Iraq, that it is absolutely vital to our national security and to the future of our country that Iraq be seen as a success in the War on Terror.

If this is so, why has he been so lethargic in defending his actions? Why hasn’t he answered his critics with anything except platitudes and rosy scenarios that bore little relation to the reality of what was actually happening on the ground? Why did he resist any review of his strategy for so long, even after it became clear that we were failing in Iraq? And why for the love of God has he dithered for more than 4 months as the violence, already severely disrupting Iraqi society by making more than half a million refugees and record numbers of civilian dead, reached new heights of savagery and brutality?

George Bush is a failure on many levels as President but he has reached the zenith of incompetence as a moral leader. His apocalyptic rhetoric about the consequences of failure in Iraq has not been backed up by the kind of leadership that would have given the American people a stake in this conflict beyond the families of our soldiers who have born the entire burden of sacrifice in this war. This has meant that support for his policies was bound to deteriorate if things went south in Iraq. And, like the moral cowardice of the Democrats who refuse to take their rhetoric about the war to its logical conclusion by advocating an immediate withdrawal, the President has demonstrated his own moral laxity by opening a huge chasm between what he says the stakes are in Iraq with his actions.

For if, as the President contends, these stakes are so high, why not call up every National Guard member and every reservist we have? If our equipment is being slowly ground down by overuse in the hot, desert-like conditions of Iraq, why not ask for a crash program to have American industry turn out new equipment? Why not constitute a new “War Production Board to prioritize and order American manufacturers to turn out what is needed to prosecute the war to a successful conclusion? Despite the loss of much of our manufacturing base, you can’t convince me that this couldn’t be done - if there was the will and the leadership to do it.

Why not rationing? Why not raise taxes? Why not put his cherished domestic agenda on hold while the American government bends every effort and concentrates almost exclusively on winning the war in Iraq?

How unrealistic am I being by hearkening back to the domestic tactics we used in World War II that successfully gave every American a stake in our victory or defeat? Obviously, very little of what I proposed above would be possible or even practicable. But I listed those actions because they illustrate a point; that the President has not tapped the enormous reserves of patriotism nor the deep, traditional well spring of self sacrifice that the American people have demonstrated they are capable of if they believe the stakes are high enough. And this President has failed miserably in doing that.

Because the President lacks the political courage to take these kinds of actions that would unite us in a common cause and call forth our best effort, we are losing the war. And now, at this late date, the best we can do is send a paltry 20,000 more men to a failing state that is in danger of falling off a cliff and turning into another Somalia - a haven for roving gangs of thugs with guns and terrorists to plan and train for their next mission against the United States.

The time for evasion by all sides is over. What we need is an up or down vote in the House and Senate on continuing this war. Either we decide to do everything in our power to prosecute the war to the fullest extent possible in order to achieve even a limited victory (defined as a stable Iraqi government in charge of its own streets) or we begin the immediate withdrawal of our forces and let the Iraqis stew in the mess we have made. Move some troops to Afghanistan where at least there is a fighting chance for success. But get them out of Iraq and allow the regional players who have done their best to undermine our efforts there to pick up the pieces themselves. We will just have to deal with their success as another aspect of the general War on Terror.

The aftermath will not be easy to overcome. But if we decide enough is enough, we will have to face the consequences of our failure and move on from there. And if we decide to do whatever it takes to win through to a limited victory, then it’s time to make the President responsible for his rhetoric.

Whatever the decision, no more straddling, no more evasions, no more hiding behind political doubletalk. For both the President and the Democrats, half measures won’t cut it. It’s time to stand up and be counted - no matter what side you’re on.

It appears that Israeli Prime Minister Olmert may be in some legal hot water. The Jerusalem Post is reporting that the State Attorney will announce that a criminal investigation will proceed when the PM returns from a far east trip:

The state has decided to open a criminal investigation against Prime Minister Ehud Olmert on his alleged role intervention in the government tender for the sale of the controlling interest in Bank Leumi stock, Channel 10 reported Tuesday evening.

Due to a conflict of interest, Attorney General Menahem Mazuz, who would ordinarily be the official to declare a criminal investigation involving a head of state, has removed himself from the Olmert affair. According to Channel 10, Mazuz’s sister may have had a role in the Bank Leumi affair.

Instead, State Attorney Eran Shendar will announce the criminal investigation after Olmert returns from his visit to China.

According to Channel 10, the extent of the investigation has not yet been announced. While police will likely concentrate on the alleged Bank Leumi improprieties, it is possible that other scandals in which Olmert is suspected of taking a role will also be addressed, such as a number of real estate deals that may have been conducted illegally, including the purchase of Olmert’s home on Rehov Cremieux in Jerusalem.

Olmert is alleged to have intervened in the government tender for the sale of the controlling interest in Bank Leumi stock. And the real estate deals that are under investigation were sweet:

A Jewish-American businessman who has donated money to Prime Minister Ehud Olmert bought a home owned by the Olmert family for 30 percent more than its market value in the mid-1990s, the Haaretz daily reported Wednesday.

The reported deal marked the latest sign of trouble for the Israeli leader, who is already facing criticism for his handling of the war in Lebanon and is being investigated for other another questionable real estate deal.

According to the report, Uri Harkham bought the home in Jerusalem’s Nahlaot neighborhood in 1995 for the inflated price of about $660,000. He sold the house several years later for $430,000 a significant loss, the report said.

Harkham, a California real-estate owner and clothing maker, contributed $25,000 to Olmert’s 1993 campaign for mayor of Jerusalem, according to the paper.

And that’s just one of Olmert’s problems. He may also be in trouble for trying to stack the Income Tax Authority with cronies:

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is a suspect in the case that exploded into the headlines today, in which “connected” businessmen are suspected of influencing top officials at the Income Tax Authority, some allegedly through the prime minister’s bureau chief Shula Zaken, to get tax breaks, reports journalist Yoav Yitzhak.

He claims the police have preliminary information but it isn’t clear if and when Olmert will be questioned.

Through his website News First Class, Yitzhak claims that Olmert enabled Zaken and her brothers to influence appointments at the Income Tax Authority, though he knew of her contacts and the businesses of her brothers.

The apex was the appointment of Jacky Matza as tax commissioner, whom the police suspect Olmert appointed at Zaken’s urging.

But Olmert had an interest in the matter, according to the suspicion, because Zaken and her brother Yoram Karashi had been involved in obtaining tax breaks for the prime minister’s personal friends and supporters.

For a guy who showed a curious lethargy in prosecuting a war against Israel’s deadliest enemy, Olmert sure exhibits a lot of energy when it comes to the finer points of political corruption and influence peddling.

In the meantime, the military man most responsible for the Lebanon debacle, IDF Chief of Staff Dan Halutz, has refused to resign and Olmert refuses to fire him. This has caused a crisis in the upper echelons of the IDF:

A senior Israel Defense Forces officer told Haaretz on Monday that many of the army’s senior officers believe the confidence crisis among the top brass is still strong, and that the coming months will test Israel Defense Forces Chief of Staff Dan Halutz’s ability to lead the army in reforms.

“A large segment of conference participants doubt the ability of the current leadership to lead,” a major general on the General Staff told Haaretz, during the first day of a two-day conference for senior IDF commanding officers.

The conference, located at the Hatzor air force base in southern Israel, was held to discuss the findings of the in-house investigations into the army’s wartime performance.

And given some of the criticisms emanating from this conference, Olmert may have to bite the bullet and fire Halutz due to the performance of the general staff during the war:

The following were mentioned among the lessons of the war: over-reliance on the Israel Air Force as a counter to Hezbollah; late call-up of reservist divisions; inability to solve the threat posed by short-range rockets; poor training and equipping of ground forces, particularly of reservist units; and failures in how decision making was made at the General Staff level.

Sources at the conference told Haaretz that in taking lessons from the war, Halutz is focusing on ways to prepare the IDF for future confrontations. They also stressed that the gathering was not presented as a setting for disagreements, and therefore many of those in attendance chose not to challenge the investigators’ findings and the relatively minor measures taken against individual officers.

It sounds like what’s wrong with the IDF won’t be fixed over night, especially the training of reserves that in recent years has suffered from budgetary concerns and perhaps a false sense that with Egypt and Jordan at peace with the Jewish state, the regular IDF forces would be able to handle most conflict scenarios that would come up. This kind of wake up call was a painful lesson and will almost certainly be addressed by Halutz or whoever is appointed to replace him.

And Olmert? He has chosen a foreign venue to admit his policy of unilateral concessions to Hamas and Hizbullah has been a failure:

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert recently expressed his disappointment with the results of Israel’s two unilateral withdrawals, saying that the violence that broke out in both Lebanon and the Gaza Strip in recent months convinced him that there is no point in any future unilateral moves of this kind.

In an interview with the Chinese news agency Xinhua prior to his departure Monday for a three-day visit to China, the prime minister said that he believes in the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside Israel. In order to achieve this, he added, Israel will have to withdraw from a large part of the territories that it controls today, and “we are ready to do this.”

“A year ago, I believed that we would be able to do this unilaterally,” the prime minister said, referring to a withdrawal from the West Bank. “However, it should be said that our experience in Lebanon and the Gaza Strip is not encouraging. We pulled out of Lebanon unilaterally, and see what happened. We pulled out of the Gaza Strip completely, to the international border, and every day they are firing Qassam rockets at Israelis.”

My reaction to that can be summed up in one utterance:

DUH!

Here’s a man who has a knack of “trivializing the momentous and complicating the obvious.” (HT: Gettysburg)

It will be interesting to see how long Olmert can survive these scandals and investigations. And it will also be interesting to see if there will be new elections in the next 6 months in Israel that may bring big changes both to the office of the Prime Minister as well as the Knesset.

US AC-130 gunships attacked some fleeing al-Qaeda members along the Somalia-Kenya border wreaking havoc, sowing confusion, and evidently killing several terrorists - including a possible al-Qaeda financier who may have assisted the bombers who destroyed our African embassies in 1998:

A U.S. Air Force AC-130 gunship attacked suspected al-Qaeda members in southern Somalia on Sunday, and U.S. sources said the operation may have hit a senior terrorist figure.

The strike took place near the Kenyan border, according to a senior officer at the Pentagon. Other sources said it was launched at night from the U.S. military facility in neighboring Djibouti. It was based on joint military-CIA intelligence and on information provided by Ethiopian and Kenyan military forces operating in the border area.

Sources said last night that initial reports indicated the attack had been successful, although information was still scanty.

“You had some figures on the move in a relatively unpopulated part of the country,” said one source confirming the attack, who, like several others, would discuss the operation only on the condition of anonymity. “It was a confluence of information and circumstances,” he said. The attack was first reported by CBS News.

This is more like it. First, we had cooperative intelligence sharing from both Ethiopia and Kenya - the two major players in that part of the world and both of whom want nothing to do with al-Qaeda and radical Islam. Secondly, the operation appeared to be well planned and expertly carried out. Third, the bonus to the operation may be the timely deaths of two higher ups in al-Qaeda who have been responsible for aiding the perpetrators of attacks on American interests:

One target of the strike, sources said, was Abu Talha al-Sudani, a Sudanese who is married to a Somali woman and has lived in Somalia since 1993 — the year of the attack against U.S. troops that was chronicled in the book and movie “Black Hawk Down.” In a 2001 U.S. court case against Osama bin Laden, Sudani was described by a leading witness as an explosives expert who was close to the al-Qaeda leader.

More recently, Sudani was identified by U.S. intelligence as a close associate of Gouled Hassan Dourad, head of a Mogadishu-based network that operated in support of al-Qaeda in Somalia. Dourad is one of 14 “high-value” prisoners transferred last September from CIA “black sites” to the U.S. military base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence then disclosed that Dourad “worked for the East African al-Qaeda cell led by . . . al-Sudani” and carried out at least one mission for him, related to a plan to bomb the U.S. military base in Djibouti.

And that’s not all. US intelligence has fingered Sudani as the financier for the terrorist attack on our embassies in 1998. And the terrorist who was the beneficiary of that financing may have been killed in the raid as well:

Others have identified Sudani as the financier for Fazul Abdullah Mohammed and Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan, believed responsible for the 1998 bombing of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. All are among the senior al-Qaeda operatives the Bush administration has charged were sheltered by Somalian Islamic fundamentalists controlling Mogadishu, the country’s capital. They are believed to have fled late last month when Ethiopian troops drove the fundamentalists out of the capital and toward the Kenyan border.

[In an interview early Tuesday, Abdirizak Hassan, chief of staff for Prime Minister Ali Mohamed Gedi, confirmed the strike. Hassan said he heard from American officials that Fazul Abdullah Mohammed had been killed, although U.S. officials said he had not been in their immediate sights. "Among the targets was Fazul," he said, "and we understand that Fazul is no more."

Hassan also said Somali officials authorized the strike. "We gave permission for actions that are more than airstrikes," Hassan said. "Whatever it means to rout these people out, we have given them permission."]

So to sum up; a multi national effort to destroy fleeing al-Qaeda terrorists, carried out with precision and our military’s usual deadly efficiency, with the permission of the UN approved and backed Somali government, may have sent two major al-Qaeda figures along with several others to hell.

One would think that such an operation could be supported by all Americans who wish to fight terrorism. In fact, I would say that this is a no brainer - even for the left.

But what do I know?

These men are believed responsible for acts of terrorism, and the people who were attacked were believed to be the men in question. Evidently that forms a sound basis for administering (or, at least, attempting to administer) the death penalty, at least by U.S. standards.

While this person represents the loopy left, even “mainstream” liberals are clucking their tongues and wagging their fingers in disapproval:

See, here’s the thing. The US, again, refused to talk directly to the ICU. The ICU, like Hezbollah, wanted, needed, recognition (even more than Hezbollah). A deal could have been made. But it wasn’t. Instead what the US has done is back a foreign invasion in support of a puppet government with no popular support…

If the ICU had taken over Somalia they could have been dealt with as you deal with nations - pressure, sanctions, maybe even bombing runs - plus the carrot of aid and trade relations. As a guerilla movement there is nothing the US can do to them that it has not already done.

The ICU will win in the long run. A lot of people will die in the meantime. Al-Qa’eda will have another haven, and the US will be reviled for putting a bunch of bloodthirsty raping monsters back into power.

All in a day’s work in the Bush administration.

I don’t know whether to fisk this idiocy or simply sit back and laugh at the breathtaking naivete and appalling ignorance.

First of all, we spent the last 6 months urging the Transitional Government to talk with more moderate elements in the Islamic Courts Union:

Frazer, the top U.S. diplomat for Africa, had said late Sunday in Nairobi that Yusuf’s government, which was formed by an international conference in 2004 and has never controlled Mogadishu, needed to bring moderate Islamists into the regime.

“I support reaching out to the … Islamic Courts,” Frazer said. “We see a role in the future of Somalia for all who renounce violence and extremism.”

The message signaled a more conciliatory U.S. stance on the Islamic Courts Movement, which had seized Mogadishu in June from U.S.-backed warlords. Initially U.S. officials based in Kenya had some contact with moderates within the movement, including Sheik Sherif Ahmed, a geography teacher who emerged as their leader.

But Ahmed soon was edged out by hard-liners, led by suspected al-Qaida operative Hassan Dahir Aweys, who laid claims to territory in neighboring countries and called for jihad against Ethiopia. Frazer made a series of statements starting in November claiming that al-Qaida terrorists had overrun the courts movement.

U.S. officials think that the militants are sheltering three terrorists who masterminded the 1998 attacks on U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. The Bush administration is widely thought to have given neighboring, Christian-led Ethiopia the green light to expel the Islamists.

Funny how the Agonist writer failed to mention that tiny detail of a declaration of jihad against largely Christian Ethiopia by the radicals in ICU long before the invasion. But then, that just doesn’t fit the narrative of the US as bloodthirsty warmongers so it could be safely jettisoned in favor of a comparison of the those gentle souls in the ICU with democratic reformers from Hizbullah.

The stupidity of such a comparison boggles the mind. Hizbullah was enormously unpopular in Lebanon even before they declared their intention to overthrow the legitimately elected government of Prime Minister Siniora. The overwhelming majority of Lebanese place the blame for starting the destructive war against Israel right where it belongs; in Hassan Nasrallah’s lap. To say that Hizbullah has any “popular support” at all beyond the Shia minority (and a sizable segment of secular Shias oppose them as well) is laughable and demonstrates a towering ignorance of what Hizbullah is doing in Lebanon - mainly the bidding of their masters in Syria and Tehran.

And the “popular support” for the ICU in Somalia?

Jubilant Somalis cheered as troops of the U.N.-backed interim government rolled into Mogadishu unopposed Thursday, putting an end to six months of domination of the capital by a radical Islamic movement.

Ethiopian soldiers stopped on the outskirts of town, after providing much of the military might in the offensive that shattered what had seemed an unbeatable Islamic militia. Islamic fighters fled south vowing to continue the battle.

“We are in Mogadishu,” Prime Minister Mohamed Ali Gedi declared after meeting with local clan leaders to discuss the peaceful hand-over of the city.

The ICU had been taken over by radical foreign Islamists in the previous months. Whatever “law and order” they brought to the country came at the expense of the security of their neighbors in Ethiopia and Kenya as the direct threat of jihad against Ethiopia proves conclusively. Not only that, it became apparent that the ICU was setting up a safe haven for terrorists who could strike US and western interests (and friends) in the region:

“We had seen intelligence evidence these three al Qaeda operatives were very much influencing the leadership of the council of the ICU — for example providing logistics, fuel and arms to the militias,” said Jendayi Frazer, the U.S. State Department’s Assistant Secretary for African Affairs.

U.S. officials in East Africa said earlier this week that al Qaeda operatives were developing the ability to attack U.S. targets just as they did when the embassy bombings killed hundreds.

Intelligence shows al Qaeda stepped up its operations in Somalia in June after an Islamic militia took power.

Their camps taught radical Islam to young men, weapons flowed in from eastern European arms dealers and money arrived from the Middle East, U.S. officials said.

“What we were really concerned about was there seemed to be much more recruiting, much more training going on. They were positioning themselves to expand their area of influence beyond Somali borders,” said Rear Adm. Richard Hunt of Task Force Horn of Africa.

Before I condemn the entire left for the stupidity exhibited above, let’s wait and see if any liberals cheer this victory against al-Qaeda. I am hoping that there is some sanity both in Congress and among the netroots who recognize that as flawed as the Transitional Government might be, they are a damn sight better than an Islamist-backed, radical fundamentalist outfit like the ICU running things.

And if we can convince the legitimate government to talk with more moderate elements in the ICU and perhaps bring them into the government in some sort of power sharing arrangement, even the left might celebrate.

Analysts who had been critical of U.S. policy in Somalia said the Bush administration might be focusing on achieving political stability there after years of being preoccupied with preventing al-Qaida cells from taking root.

“If the U.S. is indeed doing more than making a few public statements in support of dialogue with moderates, then it does represent a shift in the public face of its policy,” said John Prendergast, senior adviser to the International Crisis Group, a research center on global conflict.

The Islamists’ ouster left a power vacuum in Mogadishu, where the transitional government has little support. The city’s powerful Hawiye clan accuses Yusuf, who’s of a rival clan, of being a puppet of Ethiopia.

“If southern Somalia is to stabilize, it is essential that the transitional government hold substantial power-sharing talks with the Hawiye clan elders and Islamic Courts officials,” Prendergast said.

Trying to sweeten the deal, the U.S. has pledged $40 million in new aid to Somalia, including $14 million to support a proposed African peacekeeping mission. Frazer said the money wasn’t conditional on the transitional government negotiating with the Islamists.

We appear to be undertaking a substantial, determined effort to make the right moves in Somalia now - both militarily and diplomatically. As to the latter, patience may be a virtue that I would urge on my lefty friends. Somalia has resisted efforts to coalesce into a nation for the past 15 years and it will take time for our policies to bear fruit; that is, if we can sustain them.

But if the above excerpts from lefty blogs is the kind of mindless, knee jerk reaction to our efforts and the efforts of a sizable portion of Africa to defeat the ICU and establish a viable government in Somalia, then we can do well to ask our lefty friends a very pointed and pertinent question:

Just what will it take for you to support military action to kill our enemies?

UPDATE

Ed Morrissey:

The Ethiopians did us a big favor by dislodging the Islamists from Mogadishu. Once on the run, the US could bring all of its technological assets on line to track them, and the Air Force waited long enough for all of them to run into the trap. The Navy positioned the USS Eisenhower in the waters nearby Somalia just in case it finds even more targets to strike.

It may have taken us a long time, but we do not forget. Let’s hope that our attack took out these high-value targets and plenty of their followers to boot.

I have purged my IP Deny list from my Wordpress C-Panel thus granting access to the 27 IP’s that I have banned in the last two years.

Some of you may be under comment moderation restrictions or blacklisted from making comments at all. As long as you behave yourselves and follow the rules, I will gladly restore your unrestricted commenting privileges. If you have trouble commenting, use the Contact Form found by clicking the link in the upper left hand sidebar.

The rules for commenting are simple and ruthlessly enforced:

1. No profanity. You want to drop F-Bombs? Go to some sewer of a blog where they don’t care.

2. No insulting other commenters. You can say that someone is naive, or oblivious, or not in touch with reality.. But comparing them to Hitler or questioning their parentage, or inane name calling will not be tolerated.

3. No insulting the host. Period.

4. Comments must be germane to the post or in direct response to another comment.

5. Hate speech is not tolerated - against Christians or Muslims. If you want to tell me that all Muslims are evil or all Christians are theocrats, go someplace more conducive to your worldviews. Don’t pollute this site with your nonsense.

Comment violators will be given a warning or, if the transgression is egregious enough, banned from commenting outright.

None of the above rules apply to me. If you don’t like it, start your own blog and then you can make your own rules.

This is one of those stories that, if you’re a science buff whose enthusiasm far outstrips your actual knowledge of the subject matter, makes the hairs on the back of your head stand up and goose pimples appear.

Apparently, one of the great mysteries of the universe is being unravelled as I write this - and in spectacular fashion:

One of the greatest mysteries of the universe is about to be unravelled with the first detailed, three-dimensional map of dark matter - the invisible material that makes up most of the cosmos.

Astronomers announced yesterday that they have achieved the apparently impossible task of creating a picture of something that has defied every attempt to detect it since its existence was first postulated in 1933.

Scientists have known for many years that there is more to the universe than can be seen or detected through their telescopes but it is only now that they have been able to capture the first significant 3D-image of this otherwise invisible material.

Unlike the ordinary matter of the planets, stars and galaxies, which can be seen through telescopes or detected by scientific instruments, nobody has seen dark matter or knows what it is made of, though calculations suggest that it is at least six times bigger than the rest of the visible universe combined.

The significance of this is absolutely startling. And like all other scientific discoveries I’ve tried to understand over the years there is a terrific detective story at the heart of it - a story that reveals the best of who we are as a species as individual scientists, struggling to understand what was previously unknowable, shine a light into the darkest places of the mind to illuminate the fundamental mysteries of the universe.

The search for dark matter began in earnest once scientists realized that all the matter in the “visible” universe - including objects and phenomena not only open to study in the range of visible light but also x-rays, gamma rays, radio waves the infrared and ultraviolet spectrums - made up only a small portion of the mass of the universe. Something else was there - something exotic and mysterious. It’s existence was inferred in a variety of way but most importantly, by a phenomena known as “gravitational lensing.” Basically, this effect is achieved as very, very distant light is “bent” when it passes through a large astronomical body like a galaxy or a cluster of galaxies. The image behind these bodies appears much bigger and a variety of observations can be made that led scientists to the belief that the visible matter in the lensed object couldn’t account for all the “bending” in the light. Something else was at work, something unseen.

Using the Hubble Space Telescope and a bit of creative thinking, scientists have actually been able to “map” an area of space and image dark matter:

A team of 70 astronomers from Europe, America and Japan used the Hubble space telescope to build up a picture of dark matter in a vast region of space where some of the galaxies date back to half the age of the universe - nearly 7 billion years.

They used a phenomenon known as gravitational lensing, first predicted by Albert Einstein, to investigate an area of the sky nine times the size of a full moon. Gravitational lensing occurs when light from distant galaxies is bent by the gravitational influence of any matter that it passes on its journey through space.

The scientists were able to exploit the technique by collecting the distorted light from half a million faraway galaxies to reconstruct some of the missing mass of the universe which is otherwise invisible to conventional telescopes.

“We have, for the first time, mapped the large-scale distribution of dark matter in the universe,” said Richard Massey of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, one of the lead scientists in the team. “Dark matter is a mysterious and invisible form of matter, about which we know very little, yet it dominates the mass of the universe.”

And in what surely must be considered a moment of triumph for cosmologists, this study’s observations have confirmed the theoretical - a red letter day in any theoretician’s life:

One of the most important discoveries to emerge from the study is that dark matter appears to form an invisible scaffold or skeleton around which the visible universe has formed.

Although cosmologists have theorised that this would be the case, the findings are dramatic proof that their calculations are correct and that, without dark matter, the known universe that we can see would not be able to exist.

“A filamentary web of dark matter is threaded through the entire universe, and acts as scaffolding within which the ordinary matter - including stars, galaxies and planets - can later be built,” Dr Massey said. “The most surprising aspect of our map is how unsurprising it is. Overall, we seem to understand really well what happens during the formation of structure and the evolution of the universe,” he said.

Now the challenge will be to figure out what dark matter is made of. Already, these observations are being put to good use:

“Now that we have begun to map out where dark matter is, the next challenge is to determine what it is, and specifically its relationship to normal matter,” Dr Massey said. “We have answered the first question about where the dark matter it, but the ultimate goal will be to determine what it is.”

Various experiments on Earth are under way to try to find out what dark matter is made of. One theory is that it is composed of mysterious sub-atomic particles that are difficult to detect because they do not interact with ordinary matter and so cannot be picked up and identified by conventional scientific instruments. Comparing the maps of visible matter and dark matter have already pointed to anomalies that could prove critical to the understanding of what constitutes dark matter.

If the past is any guide, what we find will elicit more goose bumps as discovery by discovery, the universe gives up her secrets to the inquisitive minds of scientists.

I have always found it laughable that there exists a school of thought that mankind’s greatest achievements were actually the result of intervention by aliens from another civilization. The pyramids, the Nazca lines, even Stonehenge, according to this “theory,” were all built by aliens because we humans just aren’t clever enough to have done it ourselves.

Discoveries like this prove that the alien hunters consistently sell our species short. We have in the past and will continue in the future, to use our minds and imaginations to the utmost to solve the riddles of our existence - without the help of anyone else.

I haven’t written anything about Iraq recently and there’s a reason for it; I’m waiting until we hear from the only guy who counts - the Commander in Chief.

Bush is set to unveil his proposals to improve the situation in Iraq on Wednesday night. I will say this; it’s about damn time. The current uptick in violence started at the beginning of last summer and by August, we had begun transferring more troops to Baghdad to deal with it.

In September, the Iraqis and our military came up with another plan to deal with the sectarian killings because the one we had drawn up in August not only wasn’t working but wasn’t being implemented thanks to the refusal of some Iraqi army units to deploy to Baghdad. Out of 3,000 troops promised to assist Americans in their “sweep, clear, and hold” operations, only 1200 had deployed. Meanwhile, the President, fearful that any change in plan would be seen as a political downer, let things simmer in Iraq as the number of deaths skyrocketed.

After the election, the idea was that the Administration would wait for the recommendations from the Iraq Study Group to change policy. Once it became clear that the ISG was not the answer (except, perhaps for Syrians and the Iranians), only then did the President initiate this in-house review - about 6 months too late in my opinion.

But better late than never. And amidst all the talk of surges and jobs programs, I have yet to hear much about the political initiatives that we need from the Iraqis that should go hand in hand with any surge in troops. For in the end, it is only at the conference table that the various factions in Iraq will find peace - not using the barrel of a gun.

So I have taken a wait and see attitude regarding what the President will do. Couple that with the track record of most major media when it comes to these leaks actually reflecting the President’s thinking rather than one faction or another playing cheerleader by publishing recommendations they want to see included, I’ll keep my powder dry and hold off on commenting until the CIC speaks.

Have I lost faith in Bush? The answer, I’m afraid, is yes. It will take a jaw dropping speech along with imaginative and realistic ideas on how to tamp down the violence for me to believe that the Administration has a clue on how to save the situation from getting even worse much less making a start toward healing Iraqi society.

I’ll have much more to say in the days and weeks following the President’s speech. I hope that we can have a civil debate on those proposals here without having the conversation degenerating into conspiracy mongering or name calling.

Somehow…I’m not optimistic about that last part.

I can’t begin to tell you all how overwhelmed with gratitude I am for the support so many of you have shown by donating to this website.

The response was astounding. I honestly didn’t know what to expect when I asked for donations. The dozens of you who responded so generously have allowed me a little breathing room in the bills department while building up some funds for the redesign of the site that I am planning for later this summer.

I have emailed my thanks to many of you and will try to send out more today. If I miss you somehow, please accept my personal thanks for showing your support.

NOTE: This post will stay on top until Sunday evening.

UPDATE: 1/4

I have received a couple of emails complaining that the original post was too long and that I should stick to the matter at hand - asking for contributions - rather than going off on personal tangents.

In light of this excellent advice, this post will contain only the portion where I ask for funds. If you are interested in some of the blog’s highlights and my New Years Resolutions, you can go here for that info.

***********************************************************

Now to the purpose of this post - my bi-annual request for funds.

I realize that many of you generously gave when I had the “Bleg Blitz” last September - a 12 hour fund raising effort that solved an emergency need for cash when Sue’s granddaughter was born and she had to leave work to take care of her daughter in law for 10 days. For those who opened their wallets back then, I would like to again say “thank you” and please do not feel obligated to donate again.

This bleg will be more traditional. I have placed two buttons below; one connects to Amazon.com and the other to Paypal. Any amount you can give will be greatly appreciated.

I have written before of our rather modest lifestyle so your contribution will go largely to easing our monthly distress of stretching our dollars to make ends meet. If I ever get enough ahead, I plan on redesigning the blog - but so far, that just hasn’t been in the cards.

So if you like what you read here - or if I challenge your assumptions, pique your curiosity, raise your blood pressure, or make you giggle a little - I would be forever grateful of you were to contribute.

Thank you.

Rick Moran
Proprietor

There is hardly anyone at The Huffington Post who is more consistently idiotic in their commentary than Cenk Uygur - although noted political and foreign policy expert Deepak Chopra can be equally oblivious at times. The self loving self-help guru can usually be relied upon to supply equal dollops of idiocy and sanctimony while doing his best to obscure even the simplest moral questions with a heaping of platitudinous nonsense and New Age hooey.

But Uygur’s venomous rants are a cut above the normal lefty fare due to a curious lack of restraint in showing the world how ignorant he is. He revels in sophistry. He glories in irrationality. He bathes in puerility.

And the irony is, he believes he is either being clever or, in the case of this post on the startling news that Israel may use tactical nuclear weapons to destroy the Iranian nuclear program, ponderously portentous:

If Iran is at best two years away from developing a nuclear weapon and they say they have no intention of even building one, let alone using it against anybody and Israel says they are planning to use one against Iran, shouldn’t we be considering preemptive military action against Israel instead?

We claim that we care about non-proliferation. We claim that we care about the use of weapons of mass destruction. Then shouldn’t our top priority be to stop Israel?

Or could it be that we are wildly hypocritical and don’t give a damn about weapons of mass destruction as long as it is our friends who use them? Remember we didn’t mind at all when Saddam Hussein used WMD against Iran, because at the time he was on our side.

Absolutely, Cenk. I think we should believe everything the leaders of Iran say. So when they tell us they have no intention of building nukes, why not take the nutcases at their word?

And when Ahmadinejad says that he wants to “wipe Israel off the map” I’m sure he means that he only wants the cartographers of the world to use a little White-Out right where the Jewish state is penciled in. Maybe we’ll just leave that part of the map blank. We could fill it in later, perhaps after we find another democracy in the Middle East who has supported our interests and stood steadfastly by our side for 60 years. Shouldn’t be too difficult. Maybe we could get Deepak thinking about the problem.

Actually, Mr. Uygur makes a valid point about our support for Saddam in the 1980’s - if we lived in a vacuum or, like Mr. Uygur, ignored context and history for the sake of a little gratuitous American bashing. But then, the rest of us don’t live in a vacuum and recognize our tilt toward Saddam was “reality based” foreign policy - that a strong Sunni-led state in opposition to the Shia fanatics in Tehran (real gimlet eyed fanatics and not the laughable liberal definition of the weird but relatively harmless Christians who pop up now and again in the Bush Administration) was a strategic necessity.

No matter. It is Uygur’s eye popping notion that it is hypocritical to support your friends and oppose your enemies that has us scratching our heads in perplexity. Israel has been saying for nearly two years that Iran is close to building a nuclear weapon. Just a few weeks ago, Ahmadinejad proudly announced that the Iranians were going to start operating 3,000 centrifuges at their hardened site near Natanz in order to enrich uranium - progress towards construction of a nuclear weapon far in advance of our own CIA’s estimate that they mullahs were a decade away from building a bomb.

The practical result is mathematical; add Ahamdinejad’s flowery rhetoric about annihilating the Jewish state to nuclear technology and you get a threat unlike any that has confronted Israel in its history. And since the Iranians have buried their illegal program under a mountain of concrete and rock, it would appear that there is only one way for Israel to combat this threat; its own use of nuclear weapons.

Or, they could as most of the left would advocate, wait until they are hit with a nuclear weapon and then respond. Except in Israel’s case, there wouldn’t be much of a country left for anyone to worry about. Slightly larger than the state of New Jersey, one nuclear weapon detonated on their soil would, for all intents and purposes “wipe Israel off the map.” Perhaps Uygur thinks this would be an excellent jobs program. Think of all the out of work cartographers who would find employment rewriting the geography texts of the world.

What makes this screed by Uygur so ignorant is not his disapproval of Israel using nukes. It is his simple minded and naive posturing that actually places the Iranians in the morally ascendant position:

I don’t know why Israel is threatening to do this, whether it’s to get us to start a war with Iran instead (how does it make it better for us if we fight Israel’s irrational war for it) or to scare Iran into cooperating or because they’re actually going to do it. But it’s madness all the same.

Even threatening to use nuclear weapons against another sovereign country is a complete abdication of the moral high ground. Then you have absolutely no right to complain about the idea that Iran might use them at a later time. You are, in essence, saying it is perfectly acceptable to use them.

If Israel actually goes through with this, they will be an international pariah and they should no longer be considered an ally. There is no legitimate excuse to do a nuclear first strike.

This isn’t even about Israel’s concern that Iran would ever use their non-existent nuclear weapons. They know that even Iran isn’t crazy enough to risk the lives of every one of their citizens by dropping a nuclear bomb on Israel - and that would clearly be the retaliation they would face.

Instead, this is about Iran gaining bargaining leverage in the Middle East. If Israel is willing to nuke a country to make sure they don’t have slightly better leverage in the region, then their government is far more hideous than I think (I assume and hope that the government considering this barbaric idea doesn’t truly represent the will of the Israeli people).

It apparently hasn’t entered Uygur’s head that Israel would take this drastic action because it felt threatened. Instead, we are treated to the juvenile explanation that Ohlmert wants to goose the Americans into doing Israel’s dirty work for them - the Jewish conspiracy at work! And the idea that the mullahs would embrace a MAD (mutually assured destruction) doctrine has yet to be proved. In fact, given the mystical Mr. Ahmadinejad and his kooky belief in the imminent return of the 12th Imam, there is every reason to believe that if the Iranian President thought that nuking Israel would hasten the little guy’s comeback tour, he’d light the fuse himself.

And how about Uygur’s breathtaking naivete about Iran’s nuclear program? Even the simpering sot of a nuclear watchdog Muhammad ElBaradei believes Iran is close to producing a bomb. The only thing “non-existent” about the Iranian nuclear program is an ability by Uygur and the left to plug the holes in their heads where gray matter is leaking copiously. That’s the only explanation I can think of for why there is this childlike faith that when the theocrats tell us they only want to use their enrichment facilities for peaceful purposes that people like Uygur take them at their word.

Finally, I must commend Mr. Uygur for his perspicacity in gleaning the real meaning behind this Israeli threat. (Note: What Mr. Uygur makes of the Iranian threats to destroy the Jewish state, he doesn’t say. Perhaps, like Neville Chamberlain, Uygur thinks that Ahmadinejad’s shtick is for domestic consumption. Or, more likely, he doesn’t think about it at all.) To posit the notion that Israel will risk world war because they’re jealous of Iran’s “bargaining leverage, whatever that means, is daffy. Is Uygur saying that Iran’s “leverage” will improve if they get nukes? I’d say that’s a great big affirmative. And, of course, that leverage could end up levering the Israelis into the sea.

Uygur displays a towering ignorance and breathtaking myopia about Iran, about Israel, and about the existential threat that the mullahs pose to the Jewish state. This is not surprising, given he regularly displays those qualities when it comes to American security issues.

Word out of Israel this morning that Israel is denying that they are training to use tactical nukes against Iran. What else could they say? I wonder if Uygur believes them? After all, he accepts the word of the Iranians at face value that they’re not interested in building nukes. And they’re the enemy. What are the chances that Uygur would accept the word of an ally?