Geesh:

Remember the case in which Faleh al-Maleki, an Iraqi-American father brutally ran over his daughter, Noor, in Arizona, then attempted to escape but was apprehended in Britain and returned to face justice?

Guess what’s just happened? The Arizona prosecutors have been scared off seeking the death penalty. Public defender Billy Little raised the specter of “How will it look for Christians to execute a Muslim?”

I kid you not.

Billy Little asked the judge to “take special precautions to ensure the County Attorney’s Office wouldn’t wrongly seek the death penalty because Almaleki is a Muslim.” Little called for an “open process (to) provide some level of assurance that there is no appearance that a Christian is seeking to execute a Muslim for racial, political, religious or cultural beliefs,” referring to County Attorney Andrew Thomas’ Christian faith.

Keeping in mind that I’m opposed to the death penalty, I’m still upset that a American prosecutor would eschew imposing a certain penalty out of fear for a bad Moslem reaction to it. We are not a Moslem nation – “honor killing” your daughter is not something we recognize as a legitimate action, nor are concerns for religious scruples a mitigating circumstances in such a barbaric action. If this is Islam, then the whole thing should be banned in the United States.

It is time – and past time – that we started dealing with this social blight with courage. Islam is what it is and the real world is what we live in. Lets face the fact that as people who are considered such a pollution we cannot enter Islam’s holiest city, there is nothing we can do to “offend” Moslems. We are an offense to them – at least to those who might attempt to use an execution for murder as just one more bogus excuse to seek further murder of Americans.

Its like they can’t even buy a clue:

…Democrats are struggling to push healthcare legislation over the finish line in the face of sagging public support and solid Republican opposition bolstered by recent election victories in Massachusetts, Virginia and New Jersey.

The legislation the White House will post on its website is expected to reflect common ground negotiated over the past several weeks by House and Senate Democratic leaders…(emphasis added)

Uh, idiots: the reason you can’t get this thing through is because all you’ve done is talk amongst yourselves (and bribe each other, of course) and the American people aren’t liking what they see. If you want to pass a bill with popular support, you’re going to have to work with the now-surging GOP. You had your chance with your super-majorities and blew it – now its time to pay the piper.

But, the morons won’t pay it. Which is fine – ram it through, Democrats. As I’ve said, “go ahead, make my day”.

UPDATE: Charlie Cook – Health care is Obama’s Iraq

The battle continues:

Six Nato troops have been killed in Afghanistan in the worst single-day loss for international forces since the launch of a big offensive to drive Taliban insurgents from the town of Marjah.

The deaths on Thursday, followed by the loss of another soldier on Friday, underscore the risks US, UK and Afghan troops face as they seek to clear what commanders describe as pockets of resistance by fighters digging in to resist one of the biggest operations launched by Nato in Afghanistan since 2001.

The seven casualties brought the death toll of international troops from the six-day operation to 12, an official for the Nato-led force in Afghanistan said.

We’re all busy, but do not forget about these men and women. Think about them, every day – and say prayers for their victory and safe return.

God rest his soul:

Retired Army Gen. Alexander Haig, who held influential positions in the United States military and in politics and who as White House chief of staff shepherded Richard M. Nixon toward peacefully resigning the presidency, died today at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore of complications from an infection. He was 85.

A patriot with a checkered career – as can be expected from a man hired by Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan for various jobs.

And the continual fun of 2010 goes on – From Real Clear Politics:

SurveyUSA is out with job approval ratings for President Obama and Senate Democrats in a trio of West Coast states: Washington, Oregon, and California. One Democratic Senator from each state is standing for reelection this November, and the numbers demonstrate the kind of political headwind they’re facing this year.

Washington State Senator Patty Murray appears to be the most vulnerable of the bunch, with an upside-down approval rating of 43/50. Recent polling shows Murray losing narrowly to Republican Dino Rossi…

…Barbara Boxer is also showing serious signs of weakness. SurveyUSA pegs her job approval at just 47%, with 43% disapproving…

…Lastly, Ron Wyden of Oregon looks to be the most secure of the bunch, though his job approval rating is right at 50%. The other day Sean pointed out that the most recent Rasmussen poll shows him with a 14-point lead over law professor Jim Huffman but added that it was, “surprising to see Wyden below 50% against an absolute no-name.”…

It is entirely up in the air, this election of 2010. The only thing we can say with any certainty is that if you’re in office, it might not be pretty for you. Other than that, its going to go in ways probably very unexpected by the so-called experts in politics. A political revolution is like that – the old rules don’t apply.

Regardless of the particular outcomes of the various races, the most important thing, to me, is that the people are ready to take their government back…

The news:

Greg Sargent reports that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has said that he would support holding a reconciliation vote on a public option.

Said Reid spokesman Rodell Mollineau in a written statement (emphasis Sargent’s):

Senator Reid has always and continues to support the public option as a way to drive down costs and create competition. That is why he included the measure in his original health care proposal.

If a decision is made to use reconciliation to advance health care, Senator Reid will work with the White House, the House, and members of his caucus in an effort to craft a public option that can overcome procedural obstacles and secure enough votes.

But Sargent also relays the doubts of Senate leadership aides, who say they aren’t sure if the Senate parliamentarian will allow the passage of a public option via reconciliation.

There are several possibilities here:

1. Democrats are convinced that things will turn their way by November (figuring on an improving economy, etc) and thus will be able to get away with whatever the heck they want right now.

2. Democrats are just blind to the sea-change which has occurred in American politics.

3. Reid, et al are just giving some eyewash to the leftist base – keeping them quiet and on-side while, in the end, not doing anything to further anger the American people (so, pretend you are pushing health care until your spin-meisters can talk the leftwing rank-and-file in to genuinely believing that it was the mean, old GOP who failed on health care, not the Democrats with their massive Congressional majority).

We’ll just have to see how this plays out. My view is that the change in American politics is not related to the economy – in other words, that even if things hadn’t got as bad as they are and even if they improve between now and November, it won’t fundamentally alter the situation. Unemployment below 9% might rescue a few Democrats on the margins, but the determination to take America back from the corrupt and the Statists is based upon dismay over the way things are done, rather than any particular situation of the moment.

Time will tell, as in all these things…

UPDATE, McConnell on the issue:

Using reconciliation would be an acknowledgment that there is bipartisan opposition to their bill, another in a series of backroom deals, and the clearest signal yet that they’ve decided to completely ignore the American people.

We are ever the authors of our own destruction. We have been given clear, easy instructions on what to do, but we refuse the office and out of sheer perversity, set ourselvs on the path to destruction. This all stems, of course, out of our fallen nature – because we rebelled against God, we became out of sync with what we were supposed to be. It isn’t even so much, now, that we consciously rebel (though some do precisely that) but that we are internally incapable of sustained good behavior. Only a few people, by constant discipline, have trained themselves to be mostly in accordance with the truth – with God’s will in our lives. And even they will be first to say how often they still fall short.

it is because of this innate ability to fail that we must always be on guard against great power being concentrated in the hands of a few, or one. As an individual, the most spectacular failure imaginable would still, at worst, only bring down a few immediate neighbors with me. Enlarge the power I have, and you thus enlarge the scope of failure, should I not measure up. Its the difference between a man benig a fool and ruining a company employing 500 people, and another man foolishly destroying another company employing 500,000. At bottom, the larger the organization, the less actual power it should have.

Wise men have long known this. Our Founders, especially, were clear eyed about the nature of humanity. The system they built is deliberately designed to prevent things from happening – and our error this past century or so has been our efforts to get around the restrictions built in to the system. We are greatly impatient. We don’t want to go through all that tedius effort of garnering a Constitutional majority to enact a new law. So we consign powers to things like the Federal Reserve, to regulatory agencies, to the Supreme Court – if they’ll just give us a short cut to whatever we want, we’ll be fine with it. The trouble is the power we have allowed to these organization is still wielded by regular people. In other words, we’re being ruled by people just as likely to screw up on any given day as the rest of us.

And while the department of parks and recreation in your local community can screw up your city by boneheaded action, a mis-step by the Federal Reserve will mess up the entire nation. Heck, the entire world, given the importance of the United States in the global economy.

Think about where we’ve come from and where we are. Back in the 1960’s, the United States was supreme in all respects. We made more things. Grew more things, Farmed more things. We were the envy of the world – we were sending a man to the Moon. Now, in 2010, its extraordinarily difficult to even find so much as a pair of shoes made in the USA. Our mines have been moved to Chile. Our farms are in Mexico. Our factories are in China – and the United States government just decided that gonig back to the Moon is too expensive. This is the result of assigning ever more power to fewer and fewer people.

Who consulted with the people before making a decision to, say, cut off the farmers of California from the water needed to grow crops? Did you vote on that? When did we, in our deliberations as citizens, decide that we’d go decades without building an oil refinery, or a nuclear power plant? When was the vote taken which decided that the United States would become the world’s largest debtor? Indebted to China for some trillion dollars? The answer, of course, is that we never did – various elites, behind closed doors and in consultation only with those who could most financially profit from the moves, decided what would happen. And it came about this way because we did not insist that we, the people, rule this nation.

One can pick many land marks upon the road to atrophy of our democratic republic. The so-called “progressive era” of the early 20th century struck many blows at the Founders system. FDR, of course, gleefully over-rode all manner of protections for the people. But to me, the final straw, was when the Supreme Court issueed the Roe decision, legalizing abortion in all 50 States, local laws and US Constitution notwithstanding. Regardless of how one feels about abortion – pro-choice or pro-life or just not sure – it should horrify everyone in love with liberty to think that 9 judges got to decide that issue. There should have been an uprising – and it should have been led by the pro-choice people, outraged that any judge, anywhere, would usurp the rights of the people to decide such a difficult issue. But, of course, that was not the case – in fact, the pro-choice people, with that impatience noted above, led the fight to have the judges usurp the rights of the people – they wanted to be less free (though they didn’t think of it that way) because freedom was (and is) difficult and allowed for all manner of local differences (another thing which annoys those with a zeal for change – they hate the fact that a law might hold in one area, but not in another).

While that was the watershed, it was also just one in a series of dimunations of the power of the people. The whole thrust of politics over the past 100 years has been to remove power from the small and local and assign to the large and national. Some how or another, the idea developed that if we could just get things done and have “experts” lead the way, we could get things all set in no time at all. The end result of this has been the near collapse of our civilization and the near destruction of the ability of the Aermican economy to produce wealth. In the phrase of the radicals of old – though they really had no conception of what the words meant – we need “power to the people”. We need, that is, to return power to the people – to the individual, the family, the community, the states…and take most of it away from the federal government.

But not only in government, but in economics, as well. Big business is, in its own way, just as bad as big government. A huge, bureaucratic corporation can cause massive dislocation when it makes a mistake – such as what we’ve seen in instituitons like Lehman Brothers, GM and AIG. It isn’t so much about breaking up the behmoths – people have a right to invest in such firms, if they wish – but in resetting the economy so that small and mid-sized corporations are encouraged. In order to be in control of our destiny, we must reserve the most power down to the lowest level. It must be us in our families, churches, community groups and local governments who call most of the tune. If this means some localities will get it horribly wrong, then that is ok – better one town to blow it than the whole nation. Additionally, diffused power provides a series of political experiments…with everyone working on it and thinking about it, the best solutions will come up and can be copied by others.

The road back is the road to the destruction of such monstrosities as, say, the Department of Commerce. Commerce will get along just fine without Uncle Sam’s tutelage. So will Energy. The times comes, my fellow Americans, when we’ll have to courageously face up to the fact that it is we, in our communites, who can best judge the needs of our locality…and thus things like the EPA will disappear, education will become the province of parents, health care will be done by doctors and the work of America will be done in America, not overseas. We do that and freedom will bloom, again.

UPDATE: Sorry, everyone, didn’t know I had set comments to “off”. Have at it.

Hey there, everyone – heading to Reno for a few days. Blogging by me might be a bit spotty, so have at it with this open thread and I’ll try to have something up later today.

Which is news to the IAEA, but not to everyone with any sense at all:

A draft report from the International Atomic Energy Agency warns that Iran may currently be working on secret nuclear warhead. This is the strongest language the IAEA has yet used to describe Iran’s nuclear weapons program:

“The information available to the agency is extensive, … broadly consistent and credible in terms of the technical detail, the time frame in which the activities were conducted and the people and organizations involved,” the report said.

“Altogether this raises concerns about the possible existence in Iran of past or current undisclosed activities related to the development of a nuclear payload for a missile.”

Give the fact that Iran has no need to have nuclear power, at all, the only possible reason for it is weapons. And if you’re going to build nukes, you need a way to deliver them to the target. Other than smuggling a bomb, a missile or a bomber is the only way.

And so…

Or, torture, as some would have it – Mike Potemra makes some trenchant remarks about it:

The question has been raised, Was it appropriate for a Catholic TV network to provide a platform for a torture advocate? In my view, the answer is yes. Marc Thiessen, who appeared on Raymond Arroyo’s TV show The World Over, defends the practices of the past decade because he believes that these practices are necessary to defend innocent lives…

…Irealize I run the risk of being accused of special pleading in this defense of Marc (and of EWTN), so I should probably point out that I disagree with him on the underlying issue. I think torture is a great evil, and that the resort to it in the past decade is a black spot on America’s record. But I am not in a stone-throwing mood against people like Marc, because I realize that the accusation that someone is not living to up to his or her religious creed is one of the lowest and least helpful arguments imaginable. For heaven’s sake, I — in religious matters — am now a rather liberal high-church Episcopalian, and I find even that pronouncedly lenient ethic hard to live up to…

…So the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak: I accuse myself. I have been dismayed by how rapidly the resort to torture has been undertaken in recent years, in response to much lesser threats than the one in my hypothetical. (Two or three incompetent pantybombers in a decade doth not a Hitler make.) But I recognize that my difference from Marc and the others on his side of this discussion is one of degree, not of kind. And there are other reasons to ask people for generosity of spirit – notably because we may have need of it ourselves…

To me, its just doesn’t rise to the level of immorality when we compel terrorists to divulge information. Terrorists, in my view, simply do not have a right to remain silent – they must tell us what they know. Physical coercion should be used sparingly, but if that is what it takes to get them to talk, then that is what a proper understanding of morality requires in such situations.

What we have in terrorists are non-State actors who yet pose a threat to not just an individual or group of individuals, but to a whole people. This is different in kind from a bank robber who is a risk to all banks or even a murderer who is a threat to a particular person at a given time. The terrorists, if allowed the time and resources, would not just rob a bank – or even 10,000 banks. They would not just commit a murder – or even 10,000 murders. They will kill every last one of us, if they can. There is no limit to the amount of damage they may do – and unlike chasing down a murderer, once we’ve caught one of them we have only barely – and temporarily – diminished the threat.

In order to effectively combat the terrorist threat we must, as far as possible, learn what they know and what their plans are. There are many means of doing this, but the most effective way is to draw the information out of those best informed: the terrorists, themselves. When we capture a terrorist, it is a golden opportunity to gain a distinct advantage over the threat – and we must take full advantage of it, even if the captive proves reluctant to come clean. And do keep in mind that the more information we gather from one terrorist will not only save the lives of our own, but of the terrorist’s own, too. Thwarted terrorist plans means, also, a smaller number of dead terrorists, in the long run.

It is a dereliction of duty – an act of immorality – for someone who can obtain information about this threat to refuse to do so on the imagined grounds that everyone, all the time and everywhere, may not be coerced in to giving information. Some people might ask, “where do you draw the line?”. Meaning, of course, that if we allow one terrorist to be waterboarded, then we are presumptively defenseless against the claim that we must rip out the fingernails of someone who refuses to spill the beans about his neighbors tax return. To such arguments I answer: are you stupid?

I’m not. I can draw the line right where human decency requires it. I want information out of these terrorists – I don’t want so much as a hair on their heads harmed, if it can be in any way avoided. I don’t need to boil a terrorist in oil – in fact, doing so is counter-productive because a boiled terrorist cannot provide me the information I require. I want the terrorist to talk – and talk truthfully, as far as can be determined. Most of the time more regular interrogation methods will work – some times, however, it takes a bit more.

For us Christians, the greatest commandment is to love God with all our might, and love our neighbors as ourselves. Would I be loving my neighbor if I allowed my neighbor – in this case, a captive terrorist – to with hold information which may lead to the deaths of thousands? In my view, I’m not loving anyone – I’m guilty of cowardice, if I do such a thing.

I can’t help that some of my brothers and sisters make bad decisions – all I can do is react to the results of those decisions, and do my best to limit the overall damage. A man who is determined to fly a plane in to one of our buildings is someone who had gone severely wrong – the least worry we have is that it might require waterboarding to get him to talk. Our larger worry is how to change things so that it is less likely for a man to make such a choice – but part of that making change requires that any captives talk and tell us everything they know.