a company of soldiers

A notice just came around on the AR-15 mail alias about a PBS (yes, you heard that right) documentary which may be worth watching. It's a company of soldiers, airing tonight.

One senior confidential source at the Pentagon who has seen the film told us: "It is compelling stuff. It proves once again that it is our Soldiers who are our best spokespeople. It is not only courageous filmmaking (both figuratively and literally), but it's also an example of very insightful filmmaking. The film captures our Soldiers' humanity, putting a human face on a very complex set of issues - that is priceless stuff."

Follow the Money

An impressive work in progress (especially if you try the visual maps) from David Horowitz called Discover The Network. Predictably, Leftists are screaming about it. And, just as predictably, Horowitz has a response.

As we expected, the left has not taken the news presented on our site well. A pro-Islamic jihad writer for Alex Cockburn’s CounterPunch regards it naturally as  “David Horowitz’s Smear Portal” and objects to our linking noble champions of social justice like himself with the “resisters” in the Sunni triangle he supports.  But other, less politically deranged exponents of the leftist persuasion have also weighed in with objections to these inclusions. This article is by way of answering their complaints

The End of the Beginning

Chrenkoff checks in with his roundup of the last two weeks' good news from Iraq.

Yet if Iraq does pull through, the signs of slow and gradual progress will always have been there to see. I have been chronicling them in this series for nine months now, and when majority of Iraqis defied threats and cast their ballots of Jan. 30, I was not surprised. The successful election was not a bolt out of the blue but a culmination of a year and a half of hard work by millions of Iraqis and citizens of the coalition countries. To paraphrase Churchill, the election, is not the end or even the beginning of the end, but hopefully the end of the beginning. Let us hope that the journey will continue in the right direction.

In related news a woman is to be named governor of an Afghan province.

An all-female shortlist including the former women's minister Habiba Sarobi has been drawn up for the governorship of central Bamiyan province, presidential spokesman Jawed Ludin said, though no decision has been taken.

The National ID Party

An editorial in the WSJ.

Aside from the privacy implications of this show-us-your-papers Sensenbrenner approach, and the fact that governors, state legislatures and motor vehicle departments have denounced the bill as expensive and burdensome, there's another reality: Even if the Real ID Act had been in place prior to 9/11, it's unlikely that the license provisions would have prevented the attacks.

That's because all of the hijackers entered the U.S. legally, which means they qualified for drivers licenses. The Real ID Act wouldn't change that. Moreover, you don't need a driver's license to fly. Other forms of identification--such as a passport--are acceptable and also were available to the hijackers. Nothing in the Sensenbrenner bill would change that, either.

Biology or choice?

John Derbyshire has an article worth mulling over. And I'm adding part of this quotation to my quotations database:

That's science for you. Science is "cold," and doesn't care what we think or wish for. (This is a point about science that many people simply cannot grasp. The opposite of science is not religion; the opposite of science is wishful thinking.)

Judges

According to Byron York, the GOP leadership has a plan.

Pryor and Haynes will be the guinea pigs in the new Republican experiment. They were chosen carefully; both are candidates who, given the situation that exists in the Senate, will be difficult for Democrats not to filibuster. Pryor's statements on abortion alone virtually guarantee continued Democratic opposition, while Haynes seems destined to be portrayed as Mr. Abu Ghraib. If that is the case, and especially if Democratic attacks on them are strident, then Republicans feel they will be able to build the base from which to launch an attempt to break through the Democratic filibusters.

Or so they hope.

Here's hoping it works.

Don't Mess with British Oil Traders

Global terrorism suffered another setback, but this time in Jolly Olde.

“We bit off more than we could chew. They were just Cockney barrow boy spivs. Total thugs,” one protester said, rubbing his bruised skull. “I’ve never seen anyone less amenable to listening to our point of view.”

Valuable Drug Discovery at UC

If you found a way to save your employer $800,000 per year in purchasing costs, you might expect your employer to at least say thanks. Not, it turns out, if you work for UCLA.

John A. Glaspy is a world-class expert in the treatment of cancer and a rank novice in the bulk purchase of pharmaceuticals. Or rather, he was a novice until recently.

Then he discovered how to save UCLA several hundred thousand dollars a year on chemotherapy drugs.

Instead of winning praise for his resourcefulness, he got pummeled by infuriated University of California bureaucrats.

Weekly Goodness

Think of them as vitamins. VDH writes of signs of progress in the Middle East, taking Arafat and our Saudi pullout as examples.

As a rule of thumb in matters of the Middle East, be very skeptical of anything that Europe (fearful of terrorists, eager for profits, tired of Jews, scared of their own growing Islamic minorities) and the Arab League (a synonym for the autocratic rule of Sunni Muslim grandees and secular despots) cook up together. If a EU president, a Saudi royal, and a Middle East specialist in the State Department or a professor in an endowed Middle Eastern Studies chair agree that the United States is "woefully naïve," "unnecessarily provocative" or "acting unilaterally," then assume that we are pretty much on the right side of history and promoting democratic reform. "Sobriety" and "working with Arab moderates" is diplo-speak for supporting or abetting an illiberal hierarchy.

Ray Haynes explains why California doesn't get its "fair share" of "Federal Dollars" in Give Me Your Old, Your Poor And Your Really Sick.

More important, however, we now know that the reason California is getting less money than other states is that California is younger, richer and healthier than most other states. Today, California only receives about 79 cents of every dollar it sends to Washington. At first blush, this would seem unfair, and my Democrat colleagues have taken to complaining about this “unfairness” this year, more than others, to embarrass the President and the Governor. It turns out, however, that if California wants more federal dollars, using existing formulas, it would need to import more old people, more sick people and more poor people.

I put the scare quotes around "Federal Dollars" because, as my father pointed out so often, there is no such thing. It's our money, not the government's. Every penny taken in by the government is money confiscated at gunpoint from the citizenry. If you don't believe me, just stop paying your taxes and let me know how long it is before men with guns show up.

Chomsky?

Much bemused by seeing a book about Noam Chomsky being advertised here on my own page. I guess Google is still trying to figure out Buttle's World. If you must read something about him, get The Anti-Chomsky Reader by David Horowitz.

Just setting the record straight.