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Gabriel Schoenfeld in Contentions wonders about the cost of a LA Times leak.
Leaks of vital U.S. intelligence secrets can get Americans killed. They can also place Americans in a great deal of danger.
As of yesterday, Iran has seized four Iranian-Americans and charged them with spying. …
… Do these developments have anything to do with a 2002 leak about a highly classified U.S. intelligence program? …
John Fund notes the 20th anniversary of Reagan’s “tear down this wall” speech.
Rip Van Winkle has nothing on Jan Grzebski, a Polish railway worker who just emerged from a coma that began 19 years ago–just prior to the collapse of communism in his country. His take on how the world around him has changed beyond recognition comes at an appropriate time. It was 20 years ago tomorrow that Ronald Reagan electrified millions behind the Iron Curtain by standing in front of the Berlin Wall demanding: “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” …
Couple of “I” bill items. First from Mark Steyn who was hiding out at the Orange County Register.
… Back in the real world, far from those senators living in the nonshadows of their boundless self-admiration, the truth is that America’s immigration bureaucracy cannot cope with its existing caseload, and thus will certainly be unable to cope with millions of additional teeming hordes tossed into its waiting room.
Currently, the time in which an immigration adjudicator is expected to approve or reject an application is six minutes. That’s not enough time to read the basic form, never mind any supporting documentation. Under political pressure to “bring the 12 million undocumented Americans out of the shadows,” the immigration bureaucracy will rubber-stamp gazillions of applications for open-ended probationary legal status within 24 hours and with no more supporting documentation than a utility bill or an affidavit from a friend. There’s never been a better time for Mullah Omar to apply for U.S. residency. …
Then John Podhoretz, who is particularly taken with the way the “I” bill was dispatched.
… The takedown of this bill is a template for future actions against major pieces of legislation. And like so many templates for action these days, it was made possible by the Internet. Here’s how.
This was a “comprehensive” bill, designed to thoroughly “take care” of a thorny problem. It sought to address every important issue relating to immigration – border and employer enforcement, guest workers, legalization and the means by which immigrants can become citizens.
The bill runs more than 400 pages. In its many sections are many innovations and many revisions of existing law. For almost any lay person outside of government, it might as well be written in Urdu – so indecipherable is the drafting language.
That is by design. These bills aren’t written by the senators who negotiate them, but by the staffers who work for the senators. And since the bill seeks to “reform” existing laws, a lot of it simply makes reference to those laws and says Word A should be changed to Word B.
All of this shields the actual meaning of the legislation from the public, which must rely only on the general summaries of the legislation from politicians.
There was almost no way in the pre-Web era to piece together the actual provisions of reform legislation before it became law. …
Instapundit with a Porkbusters update. William Jefferson edition.
Marty Peretz with some interesting posts on grad ceremonies.
John Tierney posts on natural and synthetic pesticides.
… Dr. Ames was one of the early heroes of environmentalism. He invented the widely used Ames Test, which is a quick way to screen for potential carcinogens by seeing if a chemical causes mutations in bacteria. After he discovered that Tris, a flame-retardant in children’s pajamas, caused mutations in the Ames Test, he helped environmentalists three decades ago in their successful campaign to ban Tris — one of the early victories against synthetic chemicals.
But Dr. Ames began rethinking this war against synthetic chemicals after thousands of chemicals had been subjected to his test. He noticed that plenty of natural chemicals flunked the Ames test. He and Dr. Gold took a systematic look at the chemicals that had been tested on rodents. They found that about half of natural chemicals tested positive for carcinogencity, the same proportion as the synthetic chemicals. Fruits, vegetables, herbs and spices contained their own pesticides that caused cancer in rodents. …
The Captain posts on the Council for American Islamic Relations (CAIR). Turns out their membership has fallen to 1,700.
For a group that only has 1,700 members, it has an inordinate amount of political clout. The fact that roughly 25 people paid $3 million and represented the majority of its financing should raise some eyebrows. It comes to an average contribution of $120,000 each for last year alone.
Who are these fundraisers and what do they want? …
According to Hot Air the head of NASA has come out of the global warming closet.
Mike Griffin was a breath of fresh air when he took the reins at NASA in 2005. Coming out of the aerospace industry, Griffin seemed like the perfect choice to head up an agency that was struggling to find its way after the Columbia disaster and the lackluster leadership of administrator Sean O’Keefe.
Earlier this week, Griffin should have earned even more respect from anyone paying attention to NASA. He expressed doubt about the global warming “consensusâ€. He has since expressed regret, not for saying what he believes, but for wading into a political debate.
Alex Cockburn with more global warming stuff from the conspiratorial left.
… The Achilles’ heel of the computer models, the cornerstone of CO2 fearmongering, is their failure to deal with water. As vapor, it’s a more important greenhouse gas than CO2 by a factor of twenty, yet models have proven incapable of dealing with it. The global water cycle is complicated, with at least as much unknown as is known. Water starts by evaporating from oceans, rivers, lakes and moist ground, enters the atmosphere as water vapor, condenses into clouds and precipitates as rain or snow. Each step is influenced by temperature and each water form has an enormous impact on global heat processes. Clouds have a huge, inaccurately quantified effect on heat received from the sun. Water on the Earth’s surface has different effects on the retention of the sun’s heat, depending on whether it’s liquid, which is quite absorbent; ice, which is reflective; or snow, which is more reflective than ice. Such factors cause huge swings in the Earth’s heat balance and interact in ways that are beyond the ability of computer climate models to predict. …
Carpe Diem likes a recent George Will column.
In the humor section Dilbert posts on the greatest entrepreneur ever.
I was reading a story about Iraqi insurgents, and how they often wear ski masks to avoid identification. This made me wonder, who was the genius entrepreneur who decided to sell ski masks in the desert? Man, talk about your “outside the box†thinking. Be honest, how many of you, at the start of the Iraq war, thought “They’re going to need a lot of ski gear�