I hate to sound like your typical ghetto gun-slinging Los Angeles cop by saying that, but it’s true. There are good people, and there are bad people, and the victim of a crime isn’t going to care if a professor at an expensive school comes to the conclusion that the bad guy that killed their family member wasn’t quite as bad on the scale of one to twenty-one as the next guy on the list. While I understand that the professor who came up with this scale believes he is doing humanity a greater good by creating this scale, in the end, it’s useless and benign.

That’s one of the problems with the scientific side of criminal justice. There are the crime scene guys who take pictures, identify blood spatter (by the way, if you’re reading this Hollywood, it’s spatter, not splatter), draw up cool diagrams, and send DNA to labs somewhere in the middle of nowhere that tag a sample and send back the results. Then we have the scientists and professors at the colleges and universities that come up with these strange theories and write complex papers about killers and criminals and somehow conclude that the killer is only at fault to a certain point based on whatever scale or level they came up with. It’s a cool theory when you’re sitting in a nice office with wood panels, a bottle of scotch to share with your buddies, and more time and removal from the crime and the events as they unfolded than any officer, deputy, detective or investigator is blessed with when he or she is trying to solve a case and prevent more people from being hurt, but in the long run it doesn’t do much of anything. All that it does is pad the pockets of the scientist or professor who came up with the theory because he can write a book, go on a TV show, or secure his tenure at a well paying university.

But I disgress. This little rant wasn’t about dissing the scientists and professors, it was about the good guys and the bad guys.

Michael Connelly’s fictional LAPD detective, Harry Bosch, said it best when he said that the best way to solve a crime is to “go knock on some doors.” That’s what the victims of crime want, and when it comes down to it, that’s what they good people want. They want us to take the bad guys off the street. No level of profiling can help us get them off the street.

The Poles do not seem to be very keen on Star Wars:

Poland spurned as insufficient on Friday a U.S. offer to boost its air defenses in return for basing anti-missile interceptors on its soil but said it remained open to talks with Washington.

The decision by Poland, a staunch NATO ally, is a setback for the Bush administration drive to counter perceived threats from what Washington calls “rogue states,” particularly Iran.

The Poles are now showing the same kind of resistance to hosting a portion of our strategic defenses as our old NATO allies (West Germany) did when Reagan proposed placing medium range warheads on their soil.  The Poles have been reliable allies in Afghanistan and Iraq, so what gives?  Follow the money:

Tusk, without disclosing full details, said Washington was proposing to put Patriot batteries on Polish soil for one year.

In the months-long negotiations, Tusk’s center-right government had sought billions of dollars worth of U.S. investment to upgrade Polish air defenses in return for hosting 10 two-stage missile interceptors.

“We are ready to accept proposals or corrections from the American side which would include our proposal to increase (our) security. We can do this in a day, a week, a month,” Tusk said…

“...This is the first time that Poland has said ‘no’ to the U.S. ... It certainly sends a signal to Washington that Poland’s support should not be taken for granted in any circumstances,” said Pawel Swieboda, head of demosEuropa, a Warsaw think tank.

“But it is also the case that the government greatly raised expectations and that these were never very realistic. Poland does need some compensation (for hosting the interceptors) but they went too far in demanding Patriots.”

Clearly, we are still bargaining.

Now, I’m perfectly alright with the concept of ballistic missile defense.  It makes sense and there is a chance--a remote one--that some rogue regime may one day fire a few nuclear warheads at a nation we care about.  What bothers me about this is that I do not understand why we insist on doing things that are certain to piss off the Russians, who have been quite vocal about their opposition to this plan:

Russia has condemned the missile defense plan as a threat to its own security and has said it will target missiles at Poland and the Czech Republic—its communist-era satellite states—if the deployment goes ahead.

Now, if it is true that Iran is seen as the great threat here, why would Poland be the best place to locate anti-ballistic missiles?  Furthermore, why place them in Lithuania if the Poles balk?

The Baltic republic of Lithuania, northeast of Poland, has been suggested as an alternative site for the interceptors.

It is difficult to argue that this is not provocative.  I am not a huge fan of Pat Buchanan and his apologism for the Nazis, but I think he is right that we are making a mistake both in expanding NATO to former client states of the USSR and even former Soviet Republics and placing missiles on their territory when it appears to primarily threaten the Russians more than the stated intended targets.

Though the Red Army had picked up and gone home from Eastern Europe voluntarily, and Moscow felt it had an understanding we would not move NATO eastward, we exploited our moment. Not only did we bring Poland into NATO, we brought in Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, and virtually the whole Warsaw Pact, planting NATO right on Mother Russia’s front porch. Now, there is a scheme afoot to bring in Ukraine and Georgia in the Caucasus, the birthplace of Stalin…

...though Bush sold missile defense as directed at rogue states like North Korea, we now learn we are going to put anti-missile systems into Eastern Europe. And against whom are they directed?

How would we react to a Russian move to put anti-missile missiles on Greenland?

Gates says we have been through one Cold War and do not want another. But it is not Moscow moving a military alliance right up to our borders or building bases and planting anti-missile systems in our front and back yards.

First of all, could we only place these missiles in countries that actually want them without requiring billions of dollars of “investments”?  Secondly, should we ask NATO allies who are a little closer to Iran and a little further away from Russia to host these missile systems?  Perhaps Turkey or Greece or maybe even the one nation that has the most to fear from Iran: Israel.

NATO has already outlived its usefulness with the fall of the Soviet Empire.  It is one thing to keep an obsolete organization alive, but another entirely when we seem to actually be using it to revive the problem that it was created to oppose in the first place.

H/T: Drudge

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama says “mental distress” should not qualify as a health exception for late term-abortions, a key distinction not embraced by many supporters of abortion rights.

In an interview this week with “Relevant,” a Christian magazine, Obama said prohibitions on late-term abortions must contain “a strict, well defined exception for the health of the mother.”

Obama then added: “Now, I don’t think that ‘mental distress’ qualifies as the health of the mother. I think it has to be a serious physical issue that arises in pregnancy, where there are real, significant problems to the mother carrying that child to term.”

Last year, after the Supreme Court upheld a federal ban on late-term abortions, Obama said he “strongly disagreed” with the ruling because it “dramatically departs form previous precedents safeguarding the health of pregnant women.”

The health care exception is crucial to abortion rights advocates and is considered a legal loophole by abortion opponents. By limiting the health exception to a “serious physical issue,” Obama set himself apart from other abortion rights proponents.

The official position of NARAL Pro-Choice America, the abortion rights group that endorsed Obama in May, states: “A health exception must also account for the mental health problems that may occur in pregnancy. Severe fetal anomalies, for example, can exact a tremendous emotional toll on a pregnant woman and her family.”

While still a member of the Illinois legislature, Barack Sanger Obama thrice prevented passage of the state’s version of the Born Alive Infant Protection Act (BAIPA) by voting present, voting no, and then preventing the bill from even coming to a vote while he was the Chairman of the Illinois Senate’s Judiciary Committee.  To simply make sure that unwanted infants could not simply be left on a shelf to die after being born, they had to wait until after Obama left for the U.S. Senate.  Regardless of whether or not you think that abortion is a woman’s right to choose, consider that NARAL did not even take a position on the federal version of BAIPA.  Obama’s position on this was more extreme than that of the most prominent pro-abortion organization.  Incidentally, the federal BAIPA passed the Senate unanimously. 

He has said he supported a federal version of the law that contained more specific language because he feared the Illinois proposal would have applied to all abortions.

Really, now?  Let’s take a look at the “specific language” of the Illinois bill:

Look for the coming Surge in Afghanistan:

The Pentagon predicts the pace of attacks in Afghanistan by a resurgent Taliban is likely to rise this year, despite U.S.-led efforts to capture key leaders.

“We’re going to increase troops by 2009,” Bush said, without offering details about exactly when or how many.

It amounted to a reiteration of the promised buildup of U.S. troops before Bush leaves office in January. He said coalition forces have doubled in size over two years, and pledged that the twin strategy of fighting extremists and supporting Afghanistan’s civil development “is going to work.”

In terms of public attention, the war in Afghanistan has been obscured by the far costlier and deadlier one in Iraq.

But it is a matter of consensus within the Bush administration, and between the U.S. and key allies, that there are far too few troops in Afghanistan to fight the accelerating Taliban and to train Afghan soldiers and police.

Overall, roughly 32,000 U.S. troops are in Afghanistan, including 14,000 serving with NATO forces and 18,000 conducting training and counterinsurgency.

That’s the largest U.S. presence since the war began

Recall if you will that the war in Afghanistan is also known as the War that Pretty Much Everybody Generally Agrees On and we did everything that the Left bitterly complains that we did not do in Iraq: we were retaliating for an attack on our soil as opposed to launching a pre-emptive war, we have provided humanitarian aid, we went in with our allies, have worked closely with the UN, and we have used diplomacy with neighboring countries (specifically Pakistan) in the region. 

The Los Angeles Times plans to cut 250 positions, including 150 jobs in the print and online news departments, amid a continuing industrywide slump in ad sales, the paper’s editor said Wednesday.

The decline in advertising, fueled by a weak real estate market, has boosted the copy-to-ads ratio above the industry target of 50-50, giving readers more stories than they can digest, while the paper competes for attention with the Internet and TV, editor Russ Stanton said.

As a result, the paper will undergo a makeover by the fall that will cut pages by 15 percent per week, eliminate some sections and trim story length, Stanton said.

“The number one reason that people cancel the L.A. Times is, they tell us, they don’t have enough time to read the paper that we give them every day,” Stanton said. “We’re going to be more picky about the stories we choose to write long and a lot more picky about the ones we write shorter.”

Actually, Mr. Stanton, the reason people don’t read the LA Times is because the newspaper sucks. It’s a left-wing propoganda piece, it trashes anything that doesn’t fit its agenda, and the pretentious writers and editors make our skin crawl.

CNN polling director Keating Holland notes that Tuesday’s survey confirms what a string of national polls released this month have shown: Obama holds a slight advantage over McCain, though not a big enough one to constitute a statistical lead.

“Every standard telephone poll taken in June has shown Obama ahead of McCain, with nearly all of them showing Obama’s margin somewhere between 3 and 6 points,” Holland said. “In most of them, that margin is not enough to give him a lead in a statistical sense, but it appears that June has been a good month for Obama.”

But the new CNN/ORC poll shows that the race gets even tighter when the two most prominent third-party presidential candidates are considered.

In a four-way matchup that includes independent candidate Ralph Nader and Libertarian candidate Bob Barr, Obama’s lead over McCain dwindles to 3 percentage points, 46 percent to 43 percent. (Nader registers 6 percent, and Barr gets 3 percent.)

Frankly, I am stunned by the notion that 6% of voters do not think that Obama’s plans for pacifism, wealth redistribution, and expansion of government services go far enough.  Similarly, Barr’s polling at 3% shows that he has not even been successful in gathering up those wonderful Ron Paul supporters (oh, how I will miss them and their spammed polls, blog trolling, poetry, and truly inspiring YouTube videos).  This may have something to do with Barr telling the white nationalists to get bent, but who can say? 

We have heard a lot about how fractured conservatives are nowadays, but Barr is not making much headway; this is surpising considering the antipathy they have towards McCain.

I’ll make a prediction here: just as in 2000 when Nader was accused of handing the White House to Bush, you will hear implications from liberals that Nader is somehow a racist for trying to prevent a (semi) black guy from getting elected.  Does anybody think I am off-base here?  Given the derangement we have seen on the Left, first presented as blind hatred of Bush and then transformed into blind worship of Obama, I would not rule it out.

No matter who is elected president in November, his foreign policy team will have to deal with one of the most frustrating realities in Iraq: the slow pace at which the government in Baghdad operates.

Iraq’s political and military success is considered vital to U.S. interests, whether troops stay or go. And while the Iraqi government has made measurable progress in recent months, the rate at which it’s done so has been achingly slow.

Unfortunately, this is the kind of reporting we have come to expect from major news outlets and the reason that Iraq coverage dropped as quickly as the violence did.

The White House sees the progress in a particularly positive light, declaring in a new assessment to Congress that Iraq’s efforts on 15 of 18 benchmarks are “satisfactory” — almost twice what it determined to be the case a year ago. The May 2008 report card, obtained by the Associated Press, determines that only two of the benchmarks — enacting and implementing laws to disarm militias and distribute oil revenues — are unsatisfactory.

Naturally, the Democrats in Congress were enthusiastic to praise the progress being made acting like their usual selves:

Rep. Mike McIntyre, D-N.C., who requested the administration’s updated assessment, scoffed at the May report, which he says uses the false standard of determining whether progress on a goal is “satisfactory” versus whether the benchmark has been met. He estimates that only a few of the 18 benchmarks have been fully achieved.

I suppose now we are going to have to start debating what the meaning of the word “satisfactory” is. 

Democrats also say more solid progress could have been made had the administration starting pulling troops out sooner.

“We’ve tried repeatedly to get the administration to shift responsibility to the Iraqi leaders for their own future, since there is broad consensus that there is no military solution and only a political settlement among the Iraqis can end the conflict,” said Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan, the Democratic chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Well, I know that many people would like to have pulled the troops out so soon that they never actually went in, but the “less troops” strategy did not work quite as well as that Surge thing (the word “surge” is notably absent from the article).  Consider this AP story from almost exactly a year ago:

Iraqi leaders warned Monday the country could collapse if American troops leave too quickly as pressure mounts in Washington to draw down U.S. combat forces. More threats to Iraqi stability could be looming to the north with Turkish forces gathering in a possible prelude to a cross-border attack against Kurdish rebels.

Iraq’s foreign minister said Turkey has massed 140,000 soldiers near Iraq _ a figure immediately disputed by the Bush administration, which said satellite photos indicated no such buildup. Nevertheless, Turkey has been deploying troops on the border for several months, and the country’s foreign minister said last week that the government and military had agreed on detailed plans for a cross-border operation
The White House said President Bush is not considering a withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq now despite an erosion of support among Republicans for his war policy. A report is due Sunday on whether the Iraqi government is meeting political, economic and security benchmarks that Bush set in January when he ordered 21,500 more U.S. combat forces to Iraq.

The Iraqis were quite explicit one year ago that prematurely withdrawing troops from their country would be a disaster and they were not yet ready to go it alone.  We now see that sending in more U.S. troops absolutely did result in the accomplishment of more of the Iraqi government’s goals, despite the naysaying of Congressional Democrats and some faint-hearted Republicans.  Bush--and McCain, of course--had it right.  The Iraqi people and government still want us to stay until the country is stabilized.

According to Senator Levin (D-MI):

“The administration, however, has repeatedly missed opportunities to shift this burden to the Iraqis and appears willing to do so again,” Levin said.

Let me help you understand, Senator:

The Iraqis are taking control of this fight.  Their own defeat of the Mahdi Army in Basrah (which the Western press did their best to characterize as a defeat for the Iraqi Army) and beyond has shown that security can be accomplished provided that a neutral, unbeatable force remains to keep things fair among the factions and offer support for the duly-elected government.  Unfortunately, that happens to be us.  Everybody wants to see us end our combat obligations in Iraq, but there is no sense whatsoever in vacating the battlefield while we are still needed by our allies and winning a great victory.  Progress has been made in nearly all areas over the past year, in spite of the wishes of some spineless members of Congress and a certain presidential candidate I could name.

Bottom line - get your copy of Eat What You Want And Die Like A Man. Liberals everywhere are counting on you to make them look wimpy and metrosexual, and this book has every recipe to make that dream come true.

A former FBI agent has come forward to describe just how poorly handled the 2001 Anthrax investigation really was and why the guilty party still remains at large.

The anthrax investigation, almost from the beginning, was hampered by top-heavy leadership from high ranking, but inexperienced FBI officials, which led to a close-minded focus on just one suspect and amateurish investigative techniques that robbed agents in the field the ability operate successfully.

I’ll sum it up for you: micromanagement from the Director, over-aggressive surveillance, leaks, and too much public focus on one suspect.  Given the high profile of the case, I could almost forgive the political-types for involving themselves, but the idea of information being leaked to the media by a law enforcement agency as professional as the FBI is troubling.  I mean, we expect this kind of thing from the over-politicized CIA and State Department, but the FBI?

What bothers me most about this story is that of all of the counter-terrorism agencies in the United States, the FBI should have been the most prepared to handle such a domestic terror plot (if that is what it was) given their ultimately successful investigations of the Oklahoma City and the 1993 World Trade Center bombings, among others.  The suspect, Dr. Steven Hatfill, won a 5.8 million dollar settlement last week against the FBI for violating his privacy and harrassment.  How could the FBI forget the example of the unfortunate Richard Jewell so soon?

Granted, this happened seven years ago and the investigation is still underway, but my confidence is hardly bolstered in FBI Director Mueller when he pops off with something this inane:

FBI Director Robert Mueller on Monday criticized the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent ruling that Americans have a right to own guns for self-defense and hunting, saying it may harm efforts to deter violent crime.

Specifically, he claims that his interest is in keeping lawfully owned firearms away from campuses.  Why?

He said college campuses and small communities could be “potential incubators of terrorism” even while major cities such as New York and Los Angeles remain primary targets for terrorists.

That’s right.  There may be some maniac running loose right now with anthrax that the FBI cannot seem to find, but we are supposed to believe that the real problem is honest citizens who choose to protect themselves with firearms?  Frankly, the major concern I would have about terrorism on college campuses has more to do with cyberterrorism than a shooting spree carried out by a lone nut.  It is well-known that gun-free zones do little more than disarm would-be victims.  Armed citizens have proven quite effective in the past against active shooters, while there is not one example of an active shooter being stopped by either a university police officer or even a school resource officer in a public school that I am aware of.

As one researcher found:

In RTC (Right-to-Carry) states, civilian justifiable homicides were relatively more common when compared to the number of police justifiable homicides.

Also:

In RTC states, a firearm was used in 86.9% of all civilian JH, compared to 64.6% in non-RTC states.

Finally:

Criminals were 27.3% more “successful” in completing violent crime, and 33.3% more “successful” in completing murder attempts, in non-RTC states which highlights the effectiveness of employing a firearm as a self-defense tool (as opposed to becoming a violent crime statistic).

Does the Director of the FBI not read his agency’s own statistics on self-defense with firearms?