There’s a red-breasted rumor bird that’s been flying around Washington for a while now, but recently it’s been nesting in Capitol Hill. Talk to just about any Congressional Committee Chairman and they’ll tell what this bird has whispered in their ear.
For every newspaper in the country and around the world this morning, the supersize-font headline is the same: North Korea Admits It Has Nukes!! or a variant thereof. Yet while everyone else is running around like a panicked Chicken Little, the White House remained calm. “This is unfortunate,” Condi sedately pronounced. The most White House spokesman Scott McLellan could rouse himself to say was, “It’s rhetoric we’ve heard before.”
Why the insouciance? Because they think North Korea is bluffing. As Donald Rumsfeld put it when queried at NATO meeting in France, yes, the North Korean announcement was a cause for concern, “if you believe them that they have nuclear weapons.”
Bush has to go beyond the initial response of calm indifference and there is a debate going on among his advisors as to what that should be. A number are arguing that it should be just two words to Pyongyang: Prove it. Declare that North Korea has to prove its claim of possessing nuclear weapons with a demonstration, and until then its claim will not be taken seriously.
That means a test.
There are lots of reasons for buying PDAs, and not all of them have to do with the devices' utility; some people just like the image they think PDAs project - that of a busy, connected mover and shaker. Of course, in some circles, carrying a PDA makes you an info-geek who needs to get a life. It's sort of like the people who carry three cell phones and two beepers whenever they go out; are they "connected," or just insecure?
Ours is not to analyze the psychology of workaholics; as far as most of us are concerned, the point of a PDA is productivity when you're away from your computer, and an easy way to store bits of information you pick up on your travels, whether it's phone numbers or appointments. Ergo, the value of a PDA - to you - is in its software. So let's see just how useful a PDA can be.
You’ve heard, I’m sure, of the righteous outcry over Lt. Gen. James N. Mattis's comment that "It's fun to shoot some people," made about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the loud complaints from various leaders of special ethnic interest groups belly-aching about it.
Well, actually, it is "fun" to shoot some people - and all of us who have ever waited through an hour and a half movie, or read some 300 pages of a thriller, to the point when the bad guys finally get their comeuppance know this perfectly well.
The following letter to all members of the United States Congress was written by legendary Chinese freedom advocate and Nobel Peace Prize nominee Harry Wu. Information on the struggle for human rights in China and how to help free political prisoners being held in China’s Gulag can be found at the website of Harry’s Laogai Research Foundation. ---JW
...Business expansion and economic reforms in China have caused many people around the world to hail China as a glittering land of golden opportunity and ignore the continuing brutality perpetrated by the Communist government of China. It is often said that today’s China is not the same China that existed during the 1989 crackdown on Tiananmen Square, and is no longer even a Communist society.
Meanwhile, however, innumerable people are languishing in China’s vast Laogai system, where many have been sent without any trial taking place or any official documents being issued. Internet dissidents and religious believers are being rounded up and thrown into jail in increasing numbers in order to prevent dissent among the masses. Women and their families are being persecuted for violating the national one-child policy, and are subject to forced abortions and sterilization, detention and other punishments.
This is a very important article on a world-wide underground Islamofascist movement you never heard of, yet is a Trojan Horse for terror in America. I urge you to read it carefully and in full. ---JW
Every fall, over a million almost identically dressed, bearded Moslem men from around the world descend on the small Pakistani town of Raiwind for a three-day celebration of faith. Similar gatherings take place annually outside of Dhaka, Bangladesh, and Bhopal, India.
These pilgrims are no ordinary Moslems though. They belong to a movement called Tablighi Jamaat (“proselytizing group”). They are trained missionaries who have dedicated much of their lives to spreading Islam across the globe. The largest group of religious proselytizers of any faith, they are part of the reason for the explosive growth of Islamic religious fervor and conversion.
To the Iranian people, I say tonight: As you stand for your own liberty, America stands with you." — President Bush, in the State of the Union Address
Condoleezza Rice is not only not black, she is not a woman either. Not as far as the Left is concerned. For the Left, if you’re black or a woman, whatever your achievements are, they count only if you got them because you’re black or a woman - not because you deserved them on the basis of your ability.
If you got to where you are in life because of your ability and talents irregardless of your race or sex, then you are, for the Left, not “really,” “truly,” or “authentically” black or a woman - like, say, Al Sharpton or Barbara Boxer. Would anybody pay any attention to Al Sharpton if he wasn’t black? Would anybody pay attention to Barbara Boxer if she wasn’t a woman?
This is why, if he were alive today, Martin Luther King, Jr. would be a Republican.
My friends at the Wall Street Journal told me that Letters Editor Ned Crabb just couldn’t handle my response to the January 25 WSJ editorial “Quixotic Journey,” celebrating the 400th anniversary of Cervantes’ Don Quixote. “Let’s say it went a little bit over his head, Jack,” was how they put it.
So here it is for your enjoyment.
Dear Ned,
The 400th anniversary of the publication of Miguel de Cervantes’ “Don Quixote” is nothing to celebrate. It would be celebrating a curse.
It was about two years ago when I was talking to my friend Tony Blankley of the Washington Times and Fox News, and commented that someday George Bush’s greatness as a president would be compared to Ronald Reagan’s. Tony’s response floored me: “You know, Jack, someday it might be the other way around.”
The trifecta of the last two weeks - the Second Inaugural Address, the elections in Iraq, the State of the Union - provide an undeniable demonstration of Tony’s prescience. Yet next December 10 in Oslo, Norway, there will be another undeniable demonstration - this one of undiluted perversity. For on that day, George W. Bush will not be there to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
2005 is a twin-centennial for Rand and Einstein. Today, February 2, is the centennial of Ayn Rand’s birth in 1905. This week, scientists around the world launched a series of commemorations of the centennial of the annus mirabilis, the “miraculous year” of 1905, when a 26 year-old unknown clerk in a Swiss patent office published five papers in an obscure journal that revolutionized science and changed the way we look at the universe. In one of these, “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies,” Einstein introduced his Theory of Special Relativity.
Yet this was an incredible misnomer - for what Einstein did was replace one absolute - time - with another - the speed of light. This misnomer is one of the great social tragedies of modern times.
If you own a Palm Pilot, you've probably heard someone comment: "Hey, that's a great toy!" or "What can you do with that toy?" - The operative word being "toy."
I don't know about you, but I would take great umbrage at being accused of playing with toys. I'm as serious about my hand-held devices as anyone, and would hold my head up when I flash my Palm Pilot around.
Yet, I’m still deciding between Palm and Pocket PC.
This is the first in a short series on buying the ever more popular hand held computers.
They help you keep track of information that you need, like phone numbers and expenses. They're a lot neater than scraps of paper - and a lot less likely to get lost, as well. They keep you entertained during boring meetings, plane trips and bus or rail commutes. And "beaming" your name and phone number is a lot cooler than just handing someone your business card!
But like with every other tech thing, "they" have to make it complicated by giving you a panoply of choices and possibilities - and platforms, especially since the release of Windows CE on the Pocket PC platform several years ago. WinCE/Pocket PC competes with the granddaddy of PDAs, Palm Pilots, and the vast majority of PDAs on the market are based on one of these platforms. So buying a PDA requires more consideration than buying a digital camera.
Notice how quick President Bush’s father was to explain to the press that we don’t have to take seriously what his son said at his second inaugural about “ending tyranny in our world”? Thanks for sharing, Dad. What you really made clear is why you never had a second inaugural yourself.
The speechwriter who wrote Bush the Elder’s first and only inaugural address (where he pledged to achieve a “kinder and gentler nation,” and Nancy Reagan exploded in anger, whispering to her husband, “Kinder and gentler than what?”), Peggy Noonan whined once again in the Wall Street Journal today about GW’s “overweening” idealism, and that his speech had no “historical context.” I guess Peggy, like her former boss, didn’t pay much attention to the news last year.
Perhaps the most important story of 2004 was the achievement of democracy in so many countries. Every “realist” squish in Washington has the vapors over GW’s suddenly becoming a radically dangerous Lone Ranger cowboy - when what’s really happened is he’s acting on the old political adage that if you discover a parade that’s going where you want, get out in front and lead it.
GW’s second inaugural address was the Vision Statement. What is needed now is the Business Plan, how the vision is to be actually implemented. For an insight into Bush’s Business Plan for Ending Tyranny, we can look at the drunk coal miners of Donetsk.
Something had better jog the liberal mind from its obsessive Bush-hatred. The liberals, on both sides of the Atlantic, are in imminent danger of repeating the great shame of many of their ideological grandparents in the middle of the last century, who became unthinking apologists for Stalin's terror and tyranny.
This coming Sunday, the Iraqi people are holding an election -- the first real election in the 6,000-year history of this ancient people. But the cynicism and indifference of liberals to this extraordinary event should shock the conscience of decent people, because Iraqis are marching through shot and shell to gain this first chance at self-government.
