How “Mainstream” is Kerry?

Feb 11, 2004 | Dollars & Crosses

"In the face of the Bush administration's failures, we know what kind of campaign the Bush attack machine will run," Kerry said. "They did it to my friend John McCain in South Carolina in 2000. They did it to my friend Max Cleland in Georgia in 2002. Well, it's not going to work in 2004, for a very simple reason: They're extreme. We're mainstream, and we're going to stand up and fight back."

According to the Globe, Kerry became involved in the anti-war movement upon his return, and asked for and received an early discharge from the Navy so he could continue those efforts. How could Kerry so easily abandon his comrades in Vietnam, and then, 30 years on, call on those same men and women to back his presidential ambition? Kerry now holds himself up as a war hero and asks for my vote. Yet, 30 years ago he stood with Jane Fonda and gave aid and comfort to an enemy still killing our brother veterans by the hundreds. Bush's honorable service in the National Guard bothers me less than Kerry's abandonment of his brothers, his switching sides and his active contribution to an enemy's efforts to kill Americans.

The only relevant lesson from Vietnam is this: then, as now, it was not possible for the enemy to achieve military victory over the US; their only hope was that America would, in effect, defeat itself. And few men can claim as large a role in the loss of national will that led to that defeat as John Kerry. A brave man in Vietnam, he returned home to appear before Congress and not merely denounce the war but damn his "band of brothers" as a gang of rapists, torturers and murderers led by officers happy to license them to commit war crimes with impunity. He spent the Seventies playing Jane Fonda and he now wants to run as John Wayne.

Kerry lives in a mansion on Beacon Hill on which he has borrowed $6 million to finance his campaign. A fire hydrant that prevented him and his wife from parking their SUV in front of their tony digs was removed by the city of Boston at his behest. The Kerrys ski at a spa the widow Heinz owns in Aspen, and they summer on Nantucket in a sprawling seaside "cottage" on Hurlbert Avenue [...] It's a wonderful life these days for John Kerry. He sails Nantucket Sound in "the Scaramouche," a 42-foot Hinckley powerboat. Martha Stewart has a similar boat; the no-frills model reportedly starts at $695,000. Sen. Kerry bought it new, for cash.

Now the Al Gores Can Steal the Election

Feb 11, 2004 | Dollars & Crosses

Electronic voting shows great promise.... But there are also grave concerns: Security breaches exposed as late as this weekend reveal that the results could be manipulated by hackers....Those blind spots have been exposed three times by independent researchers, first from Johns Hopkins University, then Rice University, and finally by a security firm hired by the state of Maryland to hack into the machines last weekend. In their report, the Maryland hackers picked the electronic locks on the voting machine cases "in under 10 seconds" and created fake access cards that gave them the ability to alter results and even end the election.

Antiglobalism and Antisemitism

Feb 10, 2004 | Dollars & Crosses

An Israeli backpacker added: "I am a good Israeli. I accept the Palestinian right to violent resistance." He was crushed by the response of Faisal from Tullkarm: "I know better Israelis; they are dead."

Atkins Suffered Heart Attack According to Medical Examiner

Feb 10, 2004 | Dollars & Crosses

...Dr. Robert Atkins, whose popular diet stresses protein-rich meat and cheese over carbohydrates, weighed 258 pounds at his death and had a history of heart disease, a newspaper reported Tuesday.

Atkins died last April at age 72 after being injured in a fall on an icy street. Before his death, he had suffered a heart attack, congestive heart failure and hypertension, The Wall Street Journal reported, citing a report by the city medical examiner.

...Last month, the diet guru's widow, Veronica Atkins, demanded an apology from Mayor Michael Bloomberg after Bloomberg called her late husband "fat." She told the Journal she was outraged that the report had been made public. "I have been assured by my husband's physicians that my husband's health problems late in life were completely unrelated to his diet or any diet," she said.

...Stuart Trager, chairman of the Atkins Physicians Council in New York, told the Journal that Atkins' heart disease stemmed from cardiomyopathy, a condition that was thought to result from a viral infection.

Borakove said that, because of family objections to an autopsy, the medical examiner had conducted only "an external exam" and a review of Atkins' hospital records.

...One of the handwritten comments in the medical examiner's report referred to "MI" (myocardial infarction, the technical term for heart attack), the newspaper said. Trager said Atkins had no record of having had a heart attack, saying medical histories on examiner's reports are often written by less-experienced doctors who may not know a patient's detailed history.

...The mechanisms causing weight loss from the low-carbohydrate diets used in these studies should discourage doctors from recommending this approach to their patients. Followers of this diet complain of reduced appetite, nausea, and fatigue - all symptoms of illness. If followed strictly enough to enter ketosis - the goal of the Atkins diet - then there may be actual appetite suppression. Eating less, causes people to take in fewer calories and lose weight. Another result of eating less is they consume less saturated fat, cholesterol, sodium, and animal protein. Signs of improved health seem to appear because risk factors, like serum cholesterol, triglycerides, uric acid, and glucose, and blood pressure, decrease - and the patient is declared healthier. Not necessarily so. Similar benefits, for similar reasons, are seen when patients are placed on cancer chemotherapy - and doctors don't brag about these results.

If people want to know the truth about good nutrition, they simply need to look at the world picture. Populations following high-[unrefined] carbohydrate, low-fat, lower-protein diets, like those from traditional Asian and African countries are trim for a lifetime and avoid all the diseases common to people who follow the Western diet. The Atkins diet is simply an exaggeration of the unhealthy Western diet to a level that makes people sufficiently ill to lose their appetite.

“Intelligence Failure” Is a Non-Issue

Feb 9, 2004 | Dollars & Crosses

This, after all, was a regime that just before the first Gulf War sent its entire air force for safekeeping in Iran. If the intelligence services were wrong, every Western service and regime, from France to America, from Clinton to Chirac, failed. It is conceivable that Saddam Hussein found it important to pretend that he had nuclear weapons. He might have been like any moronic hooligan or bank robber who, faced with the police, pretends they have a weapon and often die as they reach for their toy pistol--or sunglasses.

Iraq was a regime that had a nuclear reactor (before Israel bombed it), attempted to acquire technological information abroad, refused to follow 16 U.N. resolutions, and periodically kicked out U.N.
inspectors. If its WMD program was only disinformation, it was believed because Iraq did its level best to make it credible.

Mr. Bush's policy was that his was a pre-emptive doctrine. His action was based on the notion that once you find WMD it's too late. If deployment is to be the proof of their existence, the price tag becomes too high.

[If Saddam Hussein] really didn't have any stores of unlawful weapons of mass destruction, it was very dumb of him to act as if he still did or perhaps even to believe that he still did. And it seems perfectly idiotic of anybody to complain that we have now found this out (always assuming that we have, and that there's no more disclosure to come). This highly pertinent and useful discovery could only be made by way of regime change....

It has since been established, by the Kay report, that there was a Baath plan to purchase weapons from North Korea, that materials had been hidden in the homes of scientists, and that there was a concealment program run by Qusay Hussein in person. This may look less menacing now that it has been exposed to the daylight, but there was no reason not to take it extremely seriously when it was presented as latent.

Keeping Watch on Pakistan

Feb 9, 2004 | Dollars & Crosses

America has mounted a covert operation to safeguard Pakistan's nuclear arsenal and prevent warheads from falling under the control of rogue commanders or Islamist terrorists. Teams of American specialists, deployed in Pakistan's most sensitive military sites, have formulated launch codes to prevent the unauthorised use of nuclear missiles....America's involvement in compiling missile codes raises the possibility that it might be able to prevent Pakistan from launching its nuclear weapons.

Fame was no protection for one of Pakistan's most celebrated pop stars when he indulged in the "un-Islamic" practice of singing in public. Gulzar Alam was beaten with rifle butts and fists when 20 policemen armed with AK47s raided a wedding party where he was performing....

Mr Alam had fallen foul of the Islamist coalition running Pakistan's North-West Frontier Province. For the first time, extreme religious parties have won outright control of the government of this crucial area near the border with Afghanistan. They have a simple manifesto: to reinvent the Taliban in a corner of Pakistan.

Since winning power less than 18 months ago the coalition has banned anyone from playing music or singing in public and confiscated thousands of music tapes from the bazaars. These were heaped on a huge bonfire in Peshawar and set alight by the local police chief....

When the provincial assembly meets next month the authorities will press ahead with the next stage of their campaign. They will introduce a law creating a new body modelled on the Taliban's "ministry for the promotion of virtue and prevention of vice."

This will have sweeping powers to intervene in any area of life and uphold "Islamic standards." The law will also create a parallel police and judicial system to implement a Sharia Law Act passed by the provincial assembly last year. [UK Telegraph]