October 06, 2006

Carolina Freedomnet 2006

We might not all have soccer player legs, but I still think there are plenty of reasons to come see us at Carolina Freedomnet 2006 tomorrow if you can.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 02:01 PM | Comments (7) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Ground Zero Cross Finds New Home

Via yesterday's Washington Times:

A cross-shaped steel beam that survived the 2001 World Trade Center terrorist attack to become a symbol of hope amid the ruins was moved Thursday from ground zero to a nearby church, accompanied by a procession of victims' families, clergy and construction workers.

The 2-ton, 20-foot-high cross was placed on a flatbed truck for the three-block trip to its new home, St. Peter's Church, which had served as a sanctuary for rescue workers searching for human remains from the Sept. 11 attack.

"This piece of steel meant more to many people than any piece of steel ever," said Richard Sheirer, head of the city Office of Emergency Management five years ago. "It goes beyond any religion."

Ironworkers sang "God Bless America" as hundreds of people walked behind the cross to its temporary home facing ground zero outside the 18th-century church, the city's oldest Roman Catholic parish.

"This cross is a sign of consolation and inspiration to workers who served at ground zero for the 10 months of recovery," said the Rev. Brian Jordan, a Franciscan priest who had blessed the T-beam days after it was pulled from the wreckage. "Some interpret it as a cross. Others see it as an artifact that has historical and architectural importance, a reminder that is also a sign of closure."

The Ground Zero Cross will one day likely be part of the Formal Ground Zero Memorial or the September 11 Museum.

Johann Christoph Arnold wrote a touching article about the hope inspired by the Ground Zero Cross on Catholic Planet.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 11:48 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Censored Again By ABC News

In the spirit of giving it that "old college try" once more, I once again attempted to ask Brian Ross of the ABC News blog "The Blotter" two questions I first attempted to pose days ago in the comments section of a Blotter blog post.

The two questions were quite simple, and something to the effect of:

• When did Ross become aware of the existence of the instant messages between Congressman Foley and House pages?
• Were these instant messages given to Ross and the Staff of The Blotter directly by the pages, or were they filtered through an intermediary?

I say these were "something to the effect" of the question I asked, because ABC's Blotter comments are moderated, and the moderator did not allow these questions to be posted.

I made another attempt this even to ask those questions in the comments of latest Blotter Foleygate entry, the post titled Three More Former Pages Accuse Foley of Online Sexual Approaches.

The post, about three more Congressional pages coming forward from the classes of 1998, 2000 and 2002 to claim they were "sexually approached" over the Internet by Foley, seemed another perfectly logical chance to ask Brian Ross and his investigative news team at ABC News the questions about the origins of the explicit instant messages that broke the story wide open.

And so I opened the comments section of this Blotter blog post and wrote the following, typo and all:

I've attempted to ask two very simply questions of Brian Ross before, but somehow the comment I submitted disappeared (surely a technical glitch) and so I'll try to submit these questions once more:

(1) When did Brian Ross become aware of the existence of the instant messages?

(2) Were these instant messages given to Ross and the staff of The Blotter directly by the pages, or were they filtered through an intermediary?

At the time I wrote my comment, the last posted comment showing was one made by Kris Flaneur at 11:13:47 PM (see screencap)

After I clicked "post" I was redirected to the Blotter "glitch page," where obvious problems in the form submission are parsed for errors and kicked back to the reader for correction. You've doubtlessly come across similar only forms issues before. You simple correct your mistake and move on. My goof was trying to too quickly type in my blog's URL in the appropriate field, and I missed a "p" in "http://" addressing. ABC News needs to get their web team to better integrate this page into their site by the way; the site design continuity completely falls apart here, as you can see in the second screen cap:

In any event, I fixed the URL and successfully submitted my questions to Brian Ross and the Blotter staff for the second time. Note above that comments are only posted to the site after they have been reviewed by a human moderator and approved.

We'll see soon enough if these questions go down the memory hole once more, prompting more and more bloggers to ask the question: "What did Brain Ross know, and when did he know it?" If Ross & Co. drop the questions once more, I'll have to start thinking I'm onto something.

As of 9:00 AM, 30 more coments have been added, all after I submitted my comment. ABC News has censored my questions to Brian Ross, again.

What did you know, Brain, when, and from whom did you get these IMs?

Update": Michelle Malkin gets results by taking my questions directly to Jeffrey W. Schneider of ABC News.

Mr. Schneider answers my first question about when ABC News became aware of the instant messages, but he didn't really give me the answers I was looking for to the second question, perhaps because I didn't ask it correctly.

I asked: Were these instant messages given to Ross and the Staff of The Blotter directly by the pages, or were they filtered through an intermediary?

He gave an honest response that ABC News obtained the IMs from "former pages who contacted us after reading that first story."

What I should have asked, and what I actually meant to ask, was whether or not the pages who gave the IMs to ABC News were the same pages that participated in the instant messaging sessions, or if the IMs were turned over to ABC News by other Congressional pages who were not participants in the IMs.

I've asked Mr. Schneider if he would be kind enough to clarify this small but important distinction, and await his response.

Update: Mr. Schneider was kind enough to respond:

As we have reported, the IMs came to us from other pages.

Thus, we can clarify that the Congressional pages who were targeted by disgraced former Congressman Mark Foley were preyed upon twice; once by Foley, and for a second time by their fellow pages, who were the ones who turned the IMs over to ABC News.

Others may have caught this already, but it's news to me that this is confirmed. It seems that Drudge's story yesterday is indeed correct, at least as far as that the saved instant messages obviously got into the wrong hands.

But which page or pages sent the instant messages to ABC News?

MacsMind posts a series of unfortunate events that points to one possible suspect. If his case is sound, this is going to get much uglier before it gets better.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 09:00 AM | Comments (51) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Chemical Fire Forces NC Town's Evacuation

Didn't get too much sleep last night. I was glued to the television, trying to guess how bad a chemical fire in a neighboring town was going to get and whether or not we'd need to evacuate:

Shifting winds forced Apex officials to expand an evacuation area early Friday to protect residents from a chemical gas plume that continued to spread from an industrial fire that has raged since late Thursday.

Town Manager Bruce Radford said a leak at the EQ North Carolina plant on Investment Boulevard sent several large plumes of chlorine gas into the air around 9 p.m. Thursday. A large fire broke out at the plant afterward, sending flames more than 100 feet into the night sky and setting off multiple explosions.

EQ is a licensed hazardous-waste facility that serves businesses

Apex and Wake County officials declared a state of emergency early Friday and evacuated about 16,000 people -- half of Apex -- within hours.

The fire started shortly after a chlorine gas leak was detected. As of now, the fire is still burning, and firefighters have rightly decided it would be safer to let it burn itself out. The sun is coming up and the winds going to shift, possibly forcing more evacuations.

EQ, the company that blew up, had closed and the last employee had left by 7:00 PM. The chlorine gas leak was detected around 9:00 PM and the fire came shortly afterward.

It is too early to determine a cause.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 06:23 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

October 05, 2006

Hastert Kills GOP? Nope.

Methinks I smell a dirty diaper:

House Republican candidates will suffer massive losses if House Speaker Dennis Hastert remains speaker until Election Day, according to internal polling data from a prominent GOP pollster, FOX News has learned.

"The data suggests Americans have bailed on the speaker," a Republican source briefed on the polling data told FOX News. "And the difference could be between a 20-seat loss and 50-seat loss."

Most GOP lawmakers have stood by Hastert, pending a full airing of the facts in his handling of the Mark Foley affair, in which the former Florida representative was caught exchanging salacious messages with teen pages in Congress. The new polling data, however, suggests that many voters already have made up their minds.

I'd be very curious to know who this pollster is, and what allegiances he may or may not have to any factions within the Republican Party, for the simple reason that this poll flies in the face of common sense, and reeks of Inside the Beltway hysteria.

People are going to walk into their polling pace and cast votes for the candidates on their ballots.

Have you ever gone to the ballot box and thought, "you know, Congressman "X" really screwed up. Even though he isn't from my district, I'm going to vote for someone with a radically different viewpoint than my own to teach him a lesson, even if I get screwed in the process."

What, you don't think like that? I don't think many other folks do, either.

Unless they live in his district, people don't get to vote for or against Denny Hastert, and they aren't going to radically shift their voting of their candidates representing their interests to spite themselves.

Allah may be right and Hastert very well resign tomorrow, but if he doesn't resign, the world will not end. The Republican Party won't lose by 50 seats, and it won't lose by 20 seats. It won't lose at all.

My prediction: If Hastert stays, the Republicans keep control of the House by six seats. Why?

A party with something—even an imperfect something—always beats a party of nothing, and that is something ever voter knows in his gut that they haven't created a poll to measure.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 09:13 PM | Comments (13) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Foley Pranked/ Ross Exposed?

It looks like I was at least halfway on target when I attempted to ask the staff of the ABC News blog The Blotter when Brian Ross became aware of the Foley instant messages and if the came directly from the Congressional pages involved or from a third party intermediary.

If Matt Drudge is right, we've got a partial answer to the second question:

According to two people close to former congressional page Jordan Edmund, the now famous lurid AOL Instant Message exchanges that led to the resignation of Mark Foley were part of an online prank that by mistake got into the hands of enemy political operatives, the DRUDGE REPORT can reveal.

According to one Oklahoma source who knows the former page very well, Edmund, a conservative Republican, goaded an unwitting Foley to type embarrassing comments that were then shared with a small group of young Hill politicos. The prank went awry when the saved IM sessions got into the hands of political operatives favorable to Democrats.

The primary source, an ally of Edmund, adamantly proclaims that the former page is not a homosexual. The prank scenario was confirmed by a second associate of Edmund. Both are fearful that their political careers will be affected if they are publicly brought into the matter.

The prank scenario only applies to the Edmund IM sessions and does not necessarily apply to any other exchanges between the former congressman and others.

The news come on the heels that Edmund has hired former Timothy McVeigh attorney, Stephen Jones.

This of course does not change the fact that Foley is an admitted predator, nor does it having any bearing on instant messages by other pages, nor does it make any apparent impact on the fact that Foley was able to get away with this for as long as he did. On Capitol Hill, we still don't know "who knew what, when" and if anyone else failed in their duties in protecting Congressional pages, and if so, if their failure would warrant resignation. That's what the ethics investigation is for. Until we have a better understand of what is going on in this very fluid situation, I think it's best to call off the call for heads.

I am however, brought back to my original question that I submitted to the ABC News blog comments section that disappeared (no doubt due to a technical glitch, similar to the one that exposed the page's screen name).

Brian Ross: When did you first become aware of these instant messages between House pages and Mark Foley, and who was that third party intermediary?

Inquiring minds want to know.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 03:09 PM | Comments (12) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

...Not As They Do

Sometimes I simply pity the sad, bile-filled world occupied by extremists on both ends of the political spectrum, those that seem to believe "the ends justify the means" in any and all occasions.

Such is the case with the two conservative bloggers that "outed" the former Congressional page that exchanged instant messages with disgraced Republican Congressman Mark Foley. Just as disgusting are those on the opposite end of the political spectrum that feign outrage over this act when they almost certainly would have done the same if the situation was reversed.

A prime example of this duality is Judd at the far left blog Think Progress.

Judd and his fellow extremists on the far left have now "attacked "right wing" blogger Roger L. Simon for linking to the story outing the Congressional page on his personal site and on the Pajamas Media portal (Note: I am also a Pajamas Media affiliated blogger), and "right wing" blogger Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit.com for linking to the Simon story.

It must be confusing for Simon--a Greenwich Village-loving former Civil Rights worker, novelist and screenwriter--and Reynolds--a libertarian who once stated he desired a world with "legally married gay couples with assault weapons in their closets"--to be labeled as representative of the "right wing" as Judd would make them out to be, but theri position relative to him only serves notice to just how far out on the extreme left Judd resides.

I personally disapprove of linking to the sites that outed the former page, but Judd was quite dishonest in how he attacked Simon, as while Simon linked the post, it wasn't his post's major focus:

Only the Greek playwright's manic disposition could correctly characterize the times in which we live when the semi-sex life of an obscure congressman leads to the downfall of an administration and the rise of Nancy Pelosi (!) as Speaker of the House followed by... what... impeachment hearings? Lysistrata anyone? Meanwhile, does anyone think it is ironic that so-called progressives who excoriated eavesdropping on terrorists are feasting on the publication of supposedly confidential email and IMs? You can forget about privacy. It no longer exists, if it ever did. The Patriot Act, if you think about it, is on some levels a joke, the Constitution a sideshow. The craven and rapacious stalk the corridors of power egged on by a loathesome media as hypocrisy rules and child abuse rears its ugly head with the age of consent debated by people whose only interest is their own ambitions. Meanwhile, lost in the shadows, an enemy whose "Messenger" married a nine -year old watches and waits.

The focus of Simon's post was the irony of Big Brother-paranoid liberals now glorifying in the once-private emails and instant messages of their fellow citizens. It was precisely this far left hypocrisy that Reynolds cited:

Hmm: "Meanwhile, does anyone think it is ironic that so-called progressives who excoriated eavesdropping on terrorists are feasting on the publication of supposedly confidential email and IMs? You can forget about privacy. It no longer exists, if it ever did."

Neither Simon nor Reynolds mentioned the page's name. Reynolds did not link to the blog that named the page in any way, shape or form. Simon only did so in a larger concept of showing how easily some can change their tune when it suits their political needs.

And Simon is indeed right in that respect, as a simple search of Think Progress itself shows.

Checking the emails, instant message and other communications of suspected terrorists? Think Progress is against it.

Making political hay out of the emails and instant messages of a page-molesting Republican? Think Progress is all for it, as are most other liberal sites.

Perhaps I might find the left's Republican witch hunt in the wake of Foley's resignation far more believable if they hadn't done so much to keep Democratic Congressmen accused of similar offenses in office in the past.

Democrat Mel Reynolds, unlike Foley, actually had sex with a 16 year-old. He was indicted in April of 1994, and re-elected by Democrats that November all the same. Reynolds only left Congress months after being convicted on 12 counts of sexual assault, obstruction of justice and the solicitation of child pornography.

Democrat Gerry Studds, unlike Foley, was a Congressman who had sex with a 17 year-old page and refused to apologize for it. Studds even turned his back to Congress in disrespect as they read a censure motion against him. Democrats kept him in office until he finally retired 13 years afterward.

Perhaps I could find Judd's outrage just a little more sincere if his party didn't have a track record of electing and re-electing the known sexual predators in their midst.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 01:30 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Where It Hurts

It seems that certain liberal gossip blogs don't care who they malign or misrepresent, as long as they can turn a smear to their advantage.

I mentioned last week how obsessed UNC Law Professor Eric Muller, the gossip blog Wonkette, and its parent company Gawker Media used a photoshopped picture to attack conservative blogger and journalist Michelle Malkin for what they misrepresented as "hypocrisy." Muller has since apologized.

He is the only one.

It now turns out that even after the owner of many of the pictures stolen from various Webshots.com accounts pressed both Wonkette and Gawker Media to stop the smear campaign, they have thus far to refused to answer her emails or justify their continued smears.

In response, Ashley Herzog, the owner of many of the stolen photos shown on the faked photo site, has come forward to write scathing rebuke directed at those involved:

...I wrote an e-mail to Wonkette, the blog that first posted the pictures. I explained that only one picture on the page showed the real Michelle Malkin – I took it at the Conservative Political Action Conference last February, where I briefly met her. The others had been stolen from my webpage.

Three days later my letter remained unanswered, and the smear campaign against Malkin raged on. I sent a second request to Gawker, the media empire that owns Wonkette, detailing the theft of my pictures. I was optimistic that a conglomerate worth tens of millions of dollars would show some accountability toward its audience.

Two days have passed, and my inbox is still empty.

This is the brave new world of Internet media. Like many Americans, I entered it with a naïve notion of bloggers as modern-day pamphleteers, throwing the cover off stories that the establishment media won't touch. I believed that Internet blogs, being far more democratic mediums than mainstream television networks and newspapers, would show respect for the truth.

But after visiting a few popular blogs, I realized I was sadly mistaken. At best, many zero in on political gossip and absurd non-issues, such as whether a conservative author ever posed in a swimsuit. At worst, many political blogs are cesspools of racism, misogyny, and obscenity, not to mention vicious lies.

The posts and links to my pictures are still up, and I'm no longer anticipating a response from Gawker. They are a multimillion-dollar behemoth; I'm a college kid with a claim to a few stolen photographs. They have nothing to lose by ignoring me.

However, it seems the fallout from the Malkin hoax is far from over. This morning, I received an anxious message from an Ohio State student who had just discovered the fake photo page.

She identified herself as “the girl in the bikini” and explained that Malkin's face had been photoshopped onto her body. She asked what we could do to stop the pictures from being circulated.

The answer, unfortunately, is probably “nothing.” Gawker and its ilk appear willing to perpetuate bald-faced lies in order to advance an agenda. And they don't mind taking a few innocent college girls along for the ride.

Obviously, neither the staff of Wonkette nor Gawker Media gives a fig about their continued exploitation of Ashley Herzog's photos, their exploitation of Meredith Chan, the young woman in the real bikini photo used in the Photoshop.

But there is a way to make Gawker Media respond, and that by hitting them where it hurts... the wallet. Gawker Media is estimated to be worth $76 million dollars, with their primary income generated by advertising.

I suggest that those who feel strongly about this agenda-driven abuse of Malkin, Herzog and Chan should consider a boycott of Gawker Media advertisers, accompanied by an email to the companies explaining just why they will not be purchasing products advertised on Gawker Media Web sites.

One can easily visit Gawker or Wonkette to compile a list of companies to contact.

I quickly compiled of companies advertising on these sites, including BellSouth's yellowpages.com, CarMax, Panasonic, and FSGBooks, but you can easily create your own list as well.

I'm linking them to this Malkin article called "The Gawker Smear Machine" among others, just so they know who they are spending their advertising dollars with.

I may be wrong, but I doubt this is the kind of attention they'll enjoy.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 10:59 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Not 18

There are a lot of folks getting this wrong, so follow the bold:

The page pursued by Mark Foley was 17 at the time Foley began sending explicit instant messages.

The young man was 17 when the IMs began and continued to receive IMs after he turned 18, including the now infamous House vote instant message, were sent.

That in no way mitigates the fact that a Congressman abused his position of authority in the pursuit of sexual gratification from those under his influence whether the victim is 16 or 60.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 09:21 AM | Comments (5) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

He's Baaaack...

Okay, not really, but it is an interesting retro-modern concept, and one I hope that works out well for Michael Totten and others writing for The New Pamphleeter.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 08:56 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Reprehensible Behavior

I'm a bit behind the curve on this one, but it seems that a pair of conservative bloggers exploited a mistake by ABC News and exposed the name of one of the teens that exchanged instant messages with disgraced (and now former) Florida Republican Congressman Mark Foley.

Frankly, I'm disgusted by this, and I will not link to the blogs or even mention them by name. As Michelle Malkin notes:

There was absolutely no good reason to expose the former congressional page's name and identity. Seizing on ABC News' redaction failure and reporting errors (more on that in a moment) to play gotcha in a feeble attempt to avenge Foley is not a sufficient reason to obliterate the young man's privacy. The young man was the prey, not the predator.

Outing is a horrible practice when used to attempt to bully closeted gays. Outing is even more reprehensible when used to attack those who are the targets of sexual predators.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 08:46 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

October 04, 2006

The Gay-Baiting Left

They can call it a "big tent" party all they want, but by their actions, it's rather clear that what liberals are hiding under is just another name for a large white sheet:

There's a list going around. Those disseminating it call it "The List." It's a roster of top-level Republican congressional aides who are gay.

On CBS News on Tuesday, correspondent Gloria Borger reported that there's anger among House Republicans at what an unidentified House GOPer called a "network of gay staffers and gay members who protect each other and did the Speaker a disservice." The implication is that these gay Republicans somehow helped page-pursuing Mark Foley before his ugly (and possibly illegal) conduct was exposed. The List--drawn up by gay politicos--is a partial accounting of who on Capitol Hill might be in that network.

I have a copy. I'm not going to publish it.

Not going to publish it? He's just going to mention the positions held by those on the list, as well as which Congressional offices they work for. David Corn's the kid in class who claimed he didn't "tattle" even as he pointed at the other kids. The "List" was compiled by liberal activists over the course of several years.

There is a vile, bullying aspect at play here in the left as they once again attack a minority group for daring to wander off of what Democrats feel are the borders of their liberal plantation.

A black conservative? Must be a race traitor. Let's call him Sambo, or better yet, stalk him.

A gay conservative? Let's invoke the 3/5 compromise, because gay conservatives don't have full citizenship.

Nothing like whipping up on an uppity minority to get that liberal superiority Jones satisfied.

One of these days, voters in different minority groups are going to realize that by giving the overwhelming supermajority of their votes to one party, no matter how they are treated by that party, that they've made themselves a political non-entity. They've taken themselves completely out of play, and given aware their power.

Only once both parties have the think that they could gain or lose their votes as values-based individuals and families—and not a monolithic special interest groups—will they have any real power as people.

It never amazes me that liberals abuse those they claim to represent. It only amazes me that those they abuse put up with the abuse.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 03:42 PM | Comments (22) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

A War on Terror Over

Terrorism ending not with a bang, but a whimper:

The Irish Republican Army has begun reducing its membership and shut down key units responsible for weapons-making, arms smuggling and training, an expert panel reported Wednesday in findings designed to spur a revival of Catholic-Protestant cooperation in Northern Ireland.

The British and Irish governments warmly welcomed the 60-page assessment of the Independent Monitoring Commission, a four-man panel that includes former directors of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency and the anti-terrorist unit of Scotland Yard.

The assessment reported that the IRA — which last year declared a formal end to its campaign to overthrow Northern Ireland by force and handed its weapons stockpiles to disarmament chiefs — had recently shut down three command units and "run down its terrorist capability.''
The report said the IRA has disbanded military structures, including the departments responsible for weapons procurement, engineering and training, and it had cut back rank-and-file members and stopped payments to them, the report said.

"We do not believe that PIRA is now engaged in terrorism," it added, using the group's full formal name of Provisional IRA. "We do not believe that PIRA is undertaking terrorist-type training. We do not believe that PIRA has been recruiting. ... The leadership is seeking to reduce the size of the organization. We have no evidence of targeting, procurement or engineering activity.''

The commission said the leadership of the IRA does not consider a return to terrorism as in any way a viable option and it continues to direct its members not to engage in criminal activity.

The Provisional IRA, (PIRA or "Provos") first emerged in 1969 to end Northern Ireland's status within the United Kingdom and force a united socialist Irish state through terrorist attacks. "The Troubles" lasted from the late 1960s until the late 1990s.

After 30 years of war, and an occasionally broken cease-fire measured in years, the Provos turned in their weaponry—thousands of small arms, grenades, some heavy machine guns and even surface-to-air missiles—in 2005. A year later, comand and control elements are slowly dismantling and recruitment has stopped.

The Provos called it the "Long War," and convincing arguments can be made that this was a sectarian conflict, or even a civil war.

The PIRA and other nationalist groups were only willing to negotiate a political settlement once they determined after decades of low-intensity warfare that loyalists and the British Army were not leaving. They finally accepted the inevitable, that they could not beat an indigenous government supported by its own military and police forces and strong external interests acting on the government's behalf.

Somehow, this all seems vaguely reassuring.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 02:54 PM | Comments (5) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Who Knew What, When

Flopping Aces said he saw Dick Morris making a starling charge last night on Hannity & Colmes.

It's hearsay evidence at best.

Morris says he was told by a "respected reporter" has proof that a senior Democratic member of Congress knew about Foley's sexually explicit instant messages to House pages months ago.

It remains to be seen if there is any validity to this charge. If a reporter (and that's a big "if") has such evidence, then that reporter has a moral obligation to come forward with the story. If the evidence is reasonably solid, then we would be looking at a situation where at least one Democrat knew that a sexual predator was preying upon theses teens, and did nothing for months to warn the House leadership or law enforcement of Foley's actions for obvious political gain.

Which brings me back to my questions yesterday that disappeared at the ABC News blog, The Blotter.

The questions were:

• when did Ross become aware of the existence of these instant messages?


• were these instant messages given to Ross and the Staff of The Blotter directly by the pages, or were they filtered through an intermediary?

We know that Brian Ross of ABC News has been the lead journalist on this story, and that Ross's ABC News team has compiled at least 52 separate instant messages between Foley and House pages. It seems logical that if Morris really did make the claim that a respected reporter knew of a senior House Democrat sitting on this claim, that Brian Ross, as the reporter most immersed in this story, is likely the reporter to which Morris refers.

Update: Jonah G. has the transcript (my bold):

HANNITY: All right, perhaps, but we'll examine that in the next segment. But I think more importantly here there's some fundamental, I think, fairness issues here.

Everybody that I know is glad Foley is gone, but there seems to be an issue here to purposefully politicize this issue, and I find that equally repugnant to me. And, more importantly, I think this takes on a whole new dimension, and this is it, that, if in the pursuit of political power you are going to falsely accuse individuals of knowing things about horrible scandals like this, you better have evidence, because we live in America, and those American people you're describing are fair-minded.

MORRIS: And that's going to back fire.

HANNITY: And when innocent people are smeared, Dick, I've got to believe that people would tend to side with the people that are being smeared. And I see that this is happening more and more in this scandal.

MORRIS: And that's going to back fire on the Democrats by focusing on what did Hastert know, because you know that some of the Democratic congressmen knew. I had a reporter who told me today that she knows that one very prominent member of the Democratic leadership knew about this for months. And it came out through...

HANNITY: That's a big story.

MORRIS: ... a left-wing — came out — yes, but it's up to her to break it. And came...

ALAN COLMES, CO-HOST: But, Dick, it's the Republican leadership we're dealing with here. It's their leadership.

MORRIS: Yes. I mean, the Democratic leadership knew, was what she told me. And I think that, obviously, it came out through a liberal Web site, and obviously it was fed to ABC through one of their more liberal channels. And obviously there were Democratic fingerprints on it.

But I don't think that the public is going to care much about what Hastert knew and what the Democratic leadership knew and any of that. They are going to focus on the details of this scandal, and they'll be very glad that it came out, and they will feel that it epitomizes what's wrong with Congress.

COLMES: All right, Dick, we only have a few moments here before we have to break again. But, look, this actually appeared on a Web site, "Stop Sexual Predators." I don't know that that's a liberal Web site.

We know that the Democrat in the page program in Congress was not informed. Only the Republicans knew. To actually put any blame for this on the Democratic leadership, as if they should have done something, when it's clear the Republican leadership didn't, is really not taking responsibility where it belongs.

MORRIS: Listen, I hate to take both of you on at once, but you're both missing the point. This is not a Democratic or a Republican scandal. It's a congressional scandal.

Well, the pronoun "she" and "her" seems to blow my Brian Ross theory all to Hell unless Morris was intentionally misdirecting attention away from his source. The fact remains that Morris willing to go on the record and say that Congress is to blame here, not just one party. Knowing how dirty both parties can be, that seems an honest assessment.

Now it is a matter of determining which other bums in addition to Foley need to be thrown out, and I suspect there are one or two more on both sides of the aisle. Anyone who knew about Foley's IMs (the emails were too ambiguous to act upon) to these pages and withheld that knowledge for any reason is little better than Foley himself, and is an accessory after the fact.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 08:34 AM | Comments (7) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

October 03, 2006

What Did Brian Ross Know, and When Did He Know It?

Suddenly, I'm very interested in knowing what the posting policy is at the ABC New blog, "The Blotter." Not the official policy, but the unofficial policy used by ABC News to determine which submitted comments get posted, and which ones get deleted before publication.

Their latest blog post reveals the text of another disgusting instant message between former Florida Congressman Mark Foley and an underage page, one that claims:

Former Congressman Mark Foley (R-FL) interrupted a vote on the floor of the House in 2003 to engage in Internet sex with a high school student who had served as a congressional page, according to new Internet instant messages provided to ABC News by former pages.

Claiming that Foley "interrupted" the vote is of course hyperbole (“Stop the vote! I have, err, business to take care of!” Foley was not heard to say) and not really of interest, but I did note that the instant message was made in April of 2003. 2003 was also the year that the original and far less than inflammatory emails between Foley and other pages were written.

I thought it was quite interesting that all of the reveals communications so far have dated from 2003, and so I typed in the comments section simple questions for Brian Ross and the staff of The Blotter.

I noted that all of the electronic communications that have come forward so far were dated 2003, and that Ross himself knew of the emails for 13 months before publishing his first comments on the blog.

I then asked Ross to answer a couple of simple questions in a comment to The Blotter, namely:

• when did Ross become aware of the existence of these instant messages, and;
  
• were these instant messages given to Ross and the Staff of The Blotter directly by the pages, or were they filtered through an intermediary.
  

At least, that is roughly what I remember typing. Somehow the comment didn't end up being posted on The Blotter, though literally dozens of other comments have been posted since the time I submitted very reasonable questions.

If I didn't know better, I'd think that that the staff of The Blotter was censoring comments. There are of course legitimate reasons to censor comments, ranging from removing foul and abusive language to deleting off topic comments, and many bloggers (including myself) often engage in precisely that kind of editing to keep a blog post's comments thread on topic and relevant.

But to censor legitimate on-topic questions and comments is another matter entirely, and I'm surprised that the staff of the Blotter, seasoned journalists all, is so thin-skinned that they felt compelled to kill a comment asking them logical questions about the key elements of the story itself. It was unlikely that Ross or the other ABC News reporters on this story would have actually answered these two rather simple questions, but to go so far as to keep other readers for seeing these questions only makes their answers more pressing.

What did Brian Ross know, and When did he know it? Did the pages themselves send these instant messages to the Blotter, and if so, when? Was there an intermediary involved?

I'd like to get answers to the questions, but the staff of the Blotter obviously doesn't even want the questions to be asked.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 03:23 PM | Comments (16) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Khomeini Letter Mentioned Call For Nuclear Weapons Deployment against Iraq

I'm sure Ted Koppel will tell us this was taken out of context:

Former Iranian president Ayatollah Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani has published a confidential letter by the late ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, which has stirred a great deal of controversy in Iran, in part because the letter refers to a military commander's call to pursue nuclear weapons to be deployed against Iran's hostile neighbor, Iraq.

The letter's significance, and the critical timing of its disclosure, cannot be overstated. Until now, there had been no official voices in favor of nuclear proliferation and plenty of opposite declarations
led by Khomeini's successor, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who has issued a religious decree, a fatwa, against it.

In his letter to political leaders, dated 1988, Khomeini does not make any judgment on the commander's position, which he mentions in passing in a narrative devoted to explaining the underlying reasons for his fateful decision to accept a United Nations resolution calling for a ceasefire in the Iran-Iraq War. These were the government's financial inability to persecute the war, failures in the battlefield, Saddam Hussein's backing by the United States, the increasing Americanization of the war, etc.

Khomeini's letter sets out the requirements of military commanders if they are to continue fighting against Iraq. It mentions more aircraft, helicopters, men and weapons, and also quotes the top commander saying that Iran would - within five years - need laser-guided and atomic weapons if it were to win the war.

I'm just thankful that Iranian's current leaders are past that militant desire.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 12:24 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Driven to Distraction

Pull up Memeorandum, any major news web site, or political blog this morning, and you'll see two stories prominently featured, one on the Amish school shooting that has claimed five lives so far in rural Pennsylvania, and the other one dealing with the fallout of disgraced Florida Congressman Mark Foley's sexually explicit computer communications with teenaged pages in the House of Representatives.

It is clear that Foley's conduct is disgusting, unethical, and possibly criminal. It is also clear that (barring another major news event) this will be the political hot-button topic for at least the remainder of the week, due in no small part to how badly the House Republican leadership has responded to this clearly inappropriate behavior.

Washington and those who cover it love a juicy scandal. and this certainly reaches a sustainable level of interest for political junkies.

By all accounts, Mark Foley carried out explicit conversations with teen boys. Investigations should be launched by the appropriate law enforcement agencies to see if Foley broke any laws. If he did, he should be prosecuted to the fullest extent the criminal justice system can provide. We can hope that Foley's predatory behavior has been confined to the keyboard, and that he never had to opportunity to physically act out any desires he may have had.

We can also probably agree with perfect 20/20 hindsight that the House Leadership should have more thoroughly investigated Foley's conduct, even though the parents of the page asked them to keep the matter quiet, and we can certainly fault their absence of leadership since this story came to light.

We can even understand the Democratic plan to conflate this and grasp upon it as a major issue just five weeks out from a national election. If the Republicans were the minority party and had the chance to beat the Democratic Party over the head with this, they certainly would. All of that said, this story is not important when compared to the more pressing business facing the nation.

We have 140,000 soldiers in Iraq apparently unable to effectively reduce increasing sectarian violence, and no one in either party able to articulate a viable plan to bring safety and security to the 26 million citizens of Iraq.

We have a resurgent Taliban in Afghanistan suffering crushing battlefield defeats, but we are unable to muster up the political will to go after their training camps in Pakistan, measurably improve Afghanistan's infrastructure, or destroy a poppy crop that fills the Taliban's coffers and our streets with drugs.

We have an apocalyptic religious sect ruling Iran that is so radical that Ayatollah Khomeini outlawed it while he was alive, that is attempting to acquire nuclear weapons and has already stated an intention to "wipe Israel off the map," with the apparent goal of spurring a massive retaliatory strike in the hopes that nuclear explosions over Tehran will usher forth the Twelfth Imam to bring forth the Apocalypse, not to mention North Korean threatening to detonate one of their nuclear warheads.

Ladies and gentlemen, we have major issues affecting millions of lives around the world facing us that will be determined in part by how we vote in just five short weeks.

It is perfectly understandable that Democrats would seize upon such a minor issue as Foleygate and inflate its importance if they can, because such a minor issue that is something of a scale on which they may be able to operate. But we have far more pressing concerns as a nation than the predatory emails of a degenerate Congressman affecting a handful of teen boys. We have issues that affect the very lives of tens of millions of people around the world that have suddenly been put on a backburner.

It's time we place Foleygate in its proper context as a sideshow and continue to press both political parties in America to deal with the very real and mortal threats facing other nations and our own.

Too many lives hang in the balance to do otherwise.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 10:11 AM | Comments (5) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

WaTimes Calls for Hastert's Head

Nothing like a good old-fashioned lynching, eh boys?

Sexual predators come in all shapes, sizes and partisan hues, in institutions within and without government. When predators are found they must be dealt with, forcefully and swiftly. This time the offender is a Republican, and Republicans can't simply "get ahead" of the scandal by competing to make the most noise in calls for a full investigation. The time for that is long past.

House Speaker Dennis Hastert must do the only right thing, and resign his speakership at once. Either he was grossly negligent for not taking the red flags fully into account and ordering a swift investigation, for not even remembering the order of events leading up to last week's revelations -- or he deliberately looked the other way in hopes that a brewing scandal would simply blow away.

I'm not sure if the Times has something they're withholding or if they are just far ahead of the story to a Leopoldian extreme, but what has been presented so far doesn't support their call for Hastert's resignation.

I'm not Hastert fan, and can't recall him having done much of anything as Speaker--which may well be enough reason to hang him out to dry according to some--but I'm simply seen nothing in the emails that should have warranted a major concern based purely on their content.

Denny Hastert has been utterly forgettable Speaker of the House, but I want to see more evidence that he was somehow either involved in covering up the scandal, or through gross negligence was unaware of a serious evidence of the likelihood of Foley's scandal, before calling for him to be cast down.

If the Times wants Hastert gone over this, they need to make a solid case to their readers. So far, I think they've failed to do so.

Update: Captain Ed makes a very valid argument for replacing Hastert:

As I wrote earlier, the strange reluctance of Republicans to investigate the earlier e-mails combined with Hastert's clumsy attempts to distance himself from the scandal on Friday have compounded the scandal -- which by all rights should fall completely on Mark Foley himself. Hastert's staffers told the press on Friday that he hadn't known of a problem with Foley, forcing John Boehner to retract his statement that he himself had told Hastert of the issue. Only after Thomas Reynolds went public the next day did Hastert himself admit that he had known of the earlier e-mails.

But let's put that aside for the moment, and concentrate on what Hastert and the leadership say they did in response to Foley. Once they found out about the e-mails through the complaint of an underage page, all they did was ask Foley about it, and accepted his denials at face value. Incredibly, no one apparently ever asked any of Foley's former or current pages if they had noticed any inappropriate behavior from the Congressman. What kind of an investigation doesn't address the reality of patterns in allegedly predatory behavior? Foley's uncommon interest in young teenage boys had become parlor talk among the pages, but either Hastert didn't want to find that out or deliberately avoided it. Hastert apparently made the decision not to follow procedures and refer the matter to the Page Board, the bipartisan committee that oversees pages, and that looks very clearly like a cover-up.

And someone has to explain why Foley retained his position on the Caucus for Missing and Exploited Children. No one saw a problem with this?

Even ascribing the best of intentions to Hastert and the other members of leadership, personal friendship with Foley doesn't excuse that level of incompetence. Furthermore, when the scandal broke, Hastert should have immediately explained his involvement in the earlier complaint, rather than wait for it to dribble out. That's what leadership means: controlling a situation and providing an example rather than allowing events to control you and your party. All Hastert needed to do was to come out on Friday and said, "We had a complaint about suggestive e-mails this winter, and we relied on Mark Foley's word that nothing more untoward had occurred. In hindsight, that was a mistake, but we wanted to honor the wishes of the parents and not make a public spectacle of the situation." It wouldn't have explained the earlier incompetence, but at least it would have dampened the firestorm that erupted around the changing stories of House leadership.

Perhaps Hastert should be replaced. He has not shown signs of leadership at any point in his tenure that I can readily recall, and he has now twice "stepped in it" (the first time was the absurd argument that Congressional offices are somehow out of legal jurisdiction during the William Jefferson investigation) when he has opened his mouth.

The sad fact of the matter is that incompetence is all to often the defining characteristic of "leadership" members in both parties and in the Congressional rank-and-file. If competence in government is going to be our new standard, the only people left in the halls of Congress will be the custodial staff. That's not necessarily a bad thing.

They at least, know how to clean up messes without making them worse.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 12:49 AM | Comments (4) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

October 02, 2006

A School Shooting In Amish Country

This verges on the surreal:

Six people were killed by a gunman at a one-room Amish schoolhouse in Lancaster County Monday, according to the county coroner.

Earlier, state police Cpl. Ralph Striebig said "there are a number of people dead. ... The exact number I do not know yet."

The police told FOX News that it was in fact a hostage situation and that the shooter is now killed. There were at least 12 people injured, along with the deaths, police said. Not motive is yet known.

The anti-individualist philosophy and emphasis on humility in the Amish faith makes one of their schools an odd venue for a school shooting, a crime that seems most often linked to those completely immersed in their own selfishness to a homicidal degree.

I'm not sure that anyone can precisely state what the motivations for this shooter or the others in the recent rash of school shootings may be, but I'll go ahead and argue that a society that teaches non-competitiveness on one hand and mindless recreational violence on the other is to blame as the root cause.

Not sure of what I'm talking about?

Check out the youth sports programs in your area schools and parks & recreation departments, and see if they keep score during games, or if they emphasis noncompetitive games. I know some communities where this is the case, because parents don't want children to want to deal with the "trauma" of loosing a tee ball or soccer game. Instead of learning to confront and push through losing to learn from it (which we used to call developing "character"), today's kids are often taught to avoid taking part in situations where they might lose and hurt their all-important self esteem, even if their highly regarded self esteem is unwarranted.

While these examples apply to sports, you can also look to school systems that socially promote children even though they cannot do grade-level work, or even worse, school systems that dumb-down passing grades to such a low level that passing is inevitable. Some tests for some school systems now consider "passing" to be only getting 30%-40% of questions on standardized tests correct.

Our education systems are overrun by teachers who can't teach rote facts, and more importantly, they can't teach our children to think. We are matriculating millions of American children who are completely unprepared to overcome challenges and failures in their lives.

At the same time that these same children are taught that the stupid and arrogant (Bam Margera, Natalie Maines, Paris Hilton, etc) can triumph but they can't, they ae also exposed to a media machine that cranks out slasher movies and extremely violent music lyrics and video games one after another.

We end up with children ill-equipped for success, unable to deal with failure, and programmed to see immediate violence as an acceptable answer to their short-term problems.

We shouldn't question why we've had so many school shootings lately. We should question why we've have had so few.

Update: The shooter has been identified as 32-year old delivery driver who carried out the attack in retaliation for something that happened "decades ago."

As you sow...

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 01:59 PM | Comments (17) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

1 Such a horrible thing to happen. Yet the Brady Bucnh will jump on this.
Have a Blessed Week

Posted by: Patty at October 02, 2006 03:10 PM (EJVBR)

2 Some people are just crazy and there's no need for an explanation.

Posted by: janek at October 02, 2006 03:34 PM (f5rc/)

3 Rather than restrict guns as would be advocated, it would be safer to have better access to them and less restriction. Particularly as law enforcement has given up any pretext to making our world safer, except from hookers.

Posted by: David Caskey, MD at October 02, 2006 04:26 PM (4ails)

4 I agree with your theory. Let me add a thought of my own here: I believe the 'child-labor' laws have added to the problem, in that we have precluded 'children' from any worthwhile endeavor that might inculcate some self-respect, as opposed to self-esteem. They are discouraged from achieving in school by a dumbed-down education system, aren't allowed competition in sports and finally, we won't allow 13-17 year olds a job in which they might learn something worth learning.

We keep them mindlessly busy, doing pointless activities and wonder why they're ignorant, bored and sullen.

Posted by: Cindi at October 02, 2006 05:12 PM (asVsU)

5 Allow me to paraphrase and condense what you just wrote:

"Although I haven't the foggiest idea about what might have caused this shooting, I'm not going to let that detain me from making an array of empirically unsupportable observations and causal claims that ultimately indict Society as the culprit."

Because until Society drained every ounce of competitiveness and character out of our children, hardly anyone had their heads blown off for no good reason.

Posted by: d at October 02, 2006 05:20 PM (4K53w)

6 Let me add a thought of my own here: I believe the 'child-labor' laws have added to the problem, in that we have precluded 'children' from any worthwhile endeavor that might inculcate some self-respect, as opposed to self-esteem.

Back to the mills and mines with them, I say! Their tiny hands must be good for some sort of productive enterprise. After all, these silly American labor regulations (which offer no exceptions whatsoever, damn them) are taking jobs away from American children and outsourcing them to Vietnam and Indonesia. Think of all the "character" and "self-esteem" our children might acquire from stitching soccer balls or sneakers all day long.

Posted by: d at October 02, 2006 05:26 PM (4K53w)

7 I almost entirely agree with you. However, your theory needs a small tune-up.

The claim that violent video games, slasher flicks etc. are the root cause of the source of violence in individiuals is demonstratably false. There are easily millions of individuals in the United States alone that enjoy these forms of entertainment and don't ever even have the smallest desire to kill/maim/massacre in the real world.

The root problem you need to address is that the violence stems from what you could consider a "lack of options". These kids are being mentally restrained by their teachers, leaving them in a position where they are physically unable to deal with reality. The result is that when they start having to deal with reality they can't handle it, leaving them confused, scared, and inevitably angry.

The next time you're really angry about something, ask yourself what the underlying emotion of that anger is. I guarantee you, the anger is not the "true" emotion. Anger generally is a cover for the true emotions that you're feeling - i.e. fear, confusion, desperation. The net result here is that these kids are left with nothing but their anger - and have probably never been properly taught to deal with such anger (just as they haven't been properly taught to deal with anything else).

There's only one cause here. Violent media has nothing to do with the ability of these kids to be law-abiding members of society. I guarantee you don't need violent entertainment in order to come to the thought of violence. Everything lies in how we're teaching our kids - and the result is becoming more apparent every day.

Posted by: JohnLocke at October 02, 2006 05:43 PM (ka7jG)

8 C'mon D, you know that's not what she was sayin'. I figured someone would respond with something like that though. I have to disagree with Cindi on the basis that there are things that kids can do around the neighborhood to get some money, if they're ambitious enough to do it. Mow lawns, shovel driveways, etc.. If a kid wants to work and earn some cash, they're not gonna sit around the house waiting until they turn 16 so they can finally get a little income.

I'm not sure if I agree with all the non-competetive stuff turning kids into whackjobs, or music/video games/etc.. There were lunatics prior to Grand Theft Auto III and Cannibal Corpse.

Posted by: paully at October 02, 2006 05:48 PM (yJuX3)

9 CY, you should be ashamed of a post like this. How vile. Clearly, liberals in society are at fault for this. Are you kidding me? And blaming Natalie Maines? Are you out of your skull? That is just low class.

I have to say though, I found this statement you made amusing--"We end up with children ill-equipped for success, unable to deal with failure, and programmed to see immediate violence as an acceptable answer to their short-term problems."

Sounds like the children of Confederates and Confederate sympthaizers to me.

Posted by: E at October 02, 2006 07:15 PM (ySIcX)

10 No, no, E -- Confederates settled disputes through character-building techniques like duels and lynchings and such.

Posted by: d at October 02, 2006 10:54 PM (4K53w)

11 and have probably never been properly taught to deal with such anger

We just drug'em today if they're a problem. Back in the 60's when I was in grade school, there was none of that crap. If you got out of line, you got smacked. Now you get a behavioral counceling, self esteem evals, etc.

Posted by: Purple Avenger at October 02, 2006 11:44 PM (VLNpS)

12 "Natalie Maines named as unindicted co-conspirator in Amish country school shooting. Dhimmi Chicks, at jihadi training in Pakistan, unavailable for comment."

Posted by: Doc Washboard at October 03, 2006 08:36 AM (KSxrS)

13 ConYank,

You've totally missed the point with violent video games. The problem is not that they are violent - that's been around since the dawn of video games. The problem is the transition from "3 Lives and that's it" (3LTI) carry-over from the coin-op era to the current "infinite do-over"(IDO) that is common today. In the days before IDO, if you screwed up 3 times, in the home version you had to start over and in the coin-op you had to put in another quarter. This instilled a sense of responsibility, personal accountability and urgency and a desire for excellence. Now with IDO, you can screw up as many times as you want and you always can back up to the last "winning" scenario. This teaches children that no matter how many times they screw up, they can always get a do-over. This dovetails far more concretely with your other point; take away the consequences of your actions - and if you screw up and lose, that's a consequence - then it's really no big deal. Think about it.

Posted by: jayinbmore at October 03, 2006 07:57 PM (7B2c1)

14 PReved, krosavcheg! Vizit my new site:
naked girls
star porn
freeones porn
porn movies
suicide girls
teen pussy fucking
asian teen sex
totally teen
bathroom sex

Goodbuy!

Posted by: pohititel at October 06, 2006 11:40 AM (VY4tB)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

Not All Quiet on Iran's Western Front

Iran Focus has a short post up this morning claiming that a network of "separatists:"

...was being supported and strengthened by the intelligence apparatuses of certain neighboring states and a European country which it did not identify.

The insurgent network was spread throughout two cities, including the Iranian capital of Tehran. You won't see this as a featured story by the Associated Press or Reuters, or mention on CNN or CBS News. Commenting upon the Iranian insurgency would be… problematic. It interferes with how the western news media often presents Iranian thought as a near monolith rallying behind President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, even as this is far from the case.

I suspect international news organizations purposefully under-report the long-running dissention and insurgency in the Iranian population—and propagate the Iranian government's views internally and as they apply to foreign policy (think CNN in Baghdad)—so that they are not frozen out completely of the news trickle (calling what the Iranian government censors allow a news cycle would be too generous) within the country by Ahmadinejad's government.

The fact remains that there have been several attempts on Ahmadinejad's life within Iran during the past year that have received relatively little media attention. Iran has been fighting its own long-term, low intensity insurgencies, with both Sunni Baluchis and Kurds rebelling against the central Shiite government.

In addition, Iran's government does not represent the views of all Iranian Shiites. Many Shiites believe that Iran has a legitimate right to nuclear power, but they are increasingly worried that the thinly-veiled drive towards nuclear weaponry by Ahmadinejad's apocalyptic Hojjatieh sect is pushing the country towards a conflict that they cannot win.

Iran has blamed Great Britain for supporting the elements of the Iranian insurgency, but has not yet been able to present any solid proof of those claims, as opposed to the solid physical evidence against Iran in providing material support for Hezbollah in Lebanon, Palestinian factions in the West Bank and Gaza, and the sectarian Shia violence in Iraq, in the form of captured Iranian weaponry. It would be logical, of course, for Western powers to support the various low-level insurgencies in Iran. Attacks in Iran's oil and gas producing regions can pose a threat to the stability of the central government. Hopefully Iranians can accomplish regime change without need for direct military intervention by Western armies, saving many lives on both sides.

Iran is fighting—and taking hits—from its own insurgencies, and yet mainstream media organizations seem to purposefully limit reporting on them.

One might wonder if their coverage is purposefully Jordanesque.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 10:27 AM | Comments (11) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Processing 0.03, elapsed 0.5326 seconds.
37 queries taking 0.5144 seconds, 173 records returned.
Page size 190 kb.
Powered by Minx 0.8 beta.