Oct 26, 2004 | Dollars & Crosses
From Cox and Forkum:
A controversy over whether or not Iraqi stockpiles of RDX and HMX explosives went missing before or after U.S. forces arrived has effectively defused yesterday's "breaking" story as an immediate threat to Bush's campaign. By midday the story was already off CNN's main page as a separate news item (FoxNews, however, still has it front and center). FoxNews reports: When Did Missing Explosives Disappear?.The mystery over tons of missing explosives in Iraq turned Tuesday from a question of what happened to them to when they disappeared.
The United Nations' nuclear department, the International Atomic Energy Agency, warned Monday that insurgents may have stolen the 380 tons of conventional explosives -- the kind used in the car bombing attacks that have killed many soldiers and bystanders in Iraq.
But senior Defense Department officials told FOX News they're not sure whether looters made off with the explosives or whether Saddam moved them before the war began. NBC News reported Monday night that one of its reporters was embedded with the 101st Airborne. She watched the troops conduct what can be described as a "cursory search" of the premises on April 10, and found a great deal of conventional ordnance, but no RDX or HMX.
Such questions haven't stopped Kerry from trying to exploit the issue: Kerry Blasts Bush on Missing Ammo.Kerry accused President Bush on Tuesday of trying to cover up bad decisions relating to the execution of the war in Iraq and alluded to the possibility that more bad news has yet to be uncovered.
"Mr. President, what else are you being silent about? What else are you keeping from the American people?" Kerry said during a speech in Green Bay, referring to the estimated 380 tons of highly explosive material that have gone missing from an arms depot in Iraq.
Although Kerry and the Democrats are blaming the Bush administration for losing the ammo, calling it "one of the great blunders" of the Iraq war, recent reports by NBC and further details given by the Pentagon and International Atomic Energy Agency on Tuesday suggest that the material may have been missing before the 101st Airborne Division rolled into the Al-Qaqaa facility as Saddam Hussein was being deposed in nearby Baghdad in April 2003.
Vice President Dick Cheney responded for Bush from Florida, saying, "It is not at all clear that those explosives were even at the weapons facility when our troops arrived in the area of Baghdad."
Also today, Kerry released a campaign commercial that capitalizes on the story. Apparently they did a quick edit on another commercial and inserted the new claims. (Via Little Green Footballs)
James Taranto has more: The Times Spoils CBS's Surprise.
Update October 27: This story is more complex than yesterday's reports indicated. Belmont Club has more about who saw what when and where: The RDX Problem Resolves Itself. And The Wall Street Journal ponders the political aspects of the story: Munitions Overkill.
Looks like the fuse is still smoldering after all. The story is back on CNN's main page: Missing Iraqi explosives fuel campaign rhetoric.Oct 26, 2004 | Dollars & Crosses
What a culture of submissiveness means--and how it is enforced:
On August 26, Qatar TV aired a panel discussion that included Dr. Ibrahim Elias, and the Director of The Women's Development Society, Imam Bibars, who discussed a study she performed in the Arab world: "I'd like to say that I found something that took me by surprise. I call it 'a culture of the electricity cable.' The men in the study did not know one another, but they all used to beat their wives with electricity cables. These cables are large and they would beat their wives." In defense of beatings, Dr. Elias, a lawyer, explained, "If you beat your wife and it's only light beatings in order to set things straight -- that's it...We tell him, 'They are not considered an assault, but discipline.'" Responding to the question, "What do you mean by light beatings?" he gave an example of when a man should be beat his wife: "For example, a man comes home from work and finds his wife watching TV. She doesn't even get up to make him food. He tells her once, twice, and asks again. If only once he would raise his voice and beat her, she would get up to prepare food for him and by the next day she'd be obedient. This will last for a week and when she forgets, he will remind her." ["Arab TV Instructs On Wife-Beating", NYSun, October 20, 2004]
The whole article is worth reading.Oct 26, 2004 | Dollars & Crosses
From the WSJ:A study suggests that U.S. senators possess stock-picking skills that even the most seasoned money manager would envy. During the boom years of the 1990s, senators' stock picks beat the market by 12 percentage points a year on average, according to the study. Corporate insiders, meanwhile, beat the market by about six percentage points a year, while U.S. households underperformed the market by 1.4 percentage points a year on average, according to separate studies. The final details of the study will be published in the December issue of the Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis. ...
Looking at the timing of cumulative returns, the senators also appeared to know exactly when to buy or sell their holdings. Senators would buy stocks just before the shares suddenly would outperform the market by more than 25%. Conversely, senators would sell stocks that had been beating the market by about 25% for the past year just when the shares would fall back in line with the market's performance.
I wonder how many government officials made money off ImClone using the same "inside information" that sent Sam Waksal to jail?
The researchers say senators' uncanny ability to know when to buy or sell their shares seems to stem from having access to information that other investors wouldn't have. "I don't think you need much of an imagination to realize that they're in the know," says Alan Ziobrowski, a business professor at Georgia State University in Atlanta and one of the four authors of the study.
Senators, for example, are likely to know which tax legislation is apt to pass and which companies might benefit. Or a senator who sits on a certain committee might find out that a particular company soon will be awarded a government contract or that a certain drug might get regulatory approval, says Prof. Ziobrowski.
Oct 26, 2004 | Dollars & Crosses
Writes Stephen Morris on the meaning of John Kerry's election:
Kerry's 34-year record in public life indicates that he never understood what the Cold War was about and that he does not understand the nature of the US's rogue-state or Islamist terrorist enemies now....Kerry thinks that the war on terror is like "the war against organised crime". Both, he insists, are examples of forces of chaos. Really? Since when did organised crime want to create chaos? Have you noticed the Mafia engaged in suicide bombing? Flying planes into buildings? When did any mob consider poisoning the nation's water supply? Have you heard that they are trying to acquire nuclear weapons? And is organised crime anywhere trying to convert Christian infidels to the Muslim religion? ["Stephen Morris, "Danger man John Kerry", October 25, 2004]
On Kerry holding the U.N. above the U.S.:
...As The Washington Post recalled last week, discussing the possibility of US troops being killed in Bosnia in 1994, he said: "If you mean dying in the course of the United Nations effort, yes, it is worth that. If you mean dying American troops unilaterally going in with some false presumption that we can affect the outcome, the answer is unequivocally no."
On Kerry the "moral relativist":
...Unlike many American liberals, Kerry has often expressed his discomfort with the US criticising other nations for their repressive domestic policies. Thus a Kerry administration will be one that not only does not promote democracy, it will be one in which gross human rights abroad are given little attention.
On Kerry's "soft spot" for dictators:
In 1990, in a rare act of post-Cold War political unity, the UN Security Council approved a plan to end the war in Cambodia with a UN temporary administration to organise elections in the country...Kerry opposed it. Instead, he wanted the Vietnamese-installed Hun Sen, formerly of the Khmer Rouge, to organise elections. It seems that Kerry's preference for a UN role in conflict resolution is mainly to shackle American power, but not the power of his favourite little dictatorships.
...Kerry's soft spot for the dictators of Third World countries was not confined to Vietnam and Cambodia. During the Cold War Kerry was opposed to using force against all adversaries. This was especially so in the case of Nicaragua, where Kerry began his diplomatic showboating with the Sandinistas in 1985, but also in Grenada and the 1991 Gulf War to evict Saddam from Kuwait. Kerry's benign attitude towards dictators will affect one of the US's two greatest contemporary security threats: the nuclear arming of North Korea and Iran.
Read Dr. Harry Binswanger's article for more analysis on the 2004 elections.Oct 26, 2004 | Dollars & Crosses
Excellent reasons to avoid the barbaric religious practice of circumcision:
If physicians would simply leave the newborn's penis alone, as Dr. Benjamin Spock recommends in the latest edition of Baby and Child Care, the foreskin would be left to fulfill its several functions. In infancy, the foreskin protects the glans from irritation and from fecal material. In adulthood, the function of the foreskin may at first seem obscure. The shaft and the glans of an intact (uncircumcised) man's penis are covered by skin. Retracting the foreskin reveals the glans and makes the skin on the shaft somewhat loose. Of what use is this redundant skin? During erection, the penile shaft elongates, becoming about 50% longer. The foreskin covers this lengthened shaft. It is designed to accommodate an organ that is capable of a marked increase in diameter, as well as length.
In addition, the foreskin is the most sensitive part of the penis and can enhance the quality of sexual intercourse. Anatomical studies demonstrate that the foreskin has a greater concentration of complex nerve endings than the glans. If there were any possibility that the foreskin could contribute significantly to sexual enjoyment, is that not a cogent reason for rethinking our motives for this ritual procedure?
History shows that the arguments in favor of circumcison are questionable. At the beginning of this century, one of the reasons given for circumcision was to decrease masturbation, which was thought to lead to insanity and other "morbid" conditions. We now know that circumcision does not prevent masturbation, nor does masturbation lead to insanity. More recently, circumcision was promoted as a means of preventing cervical cancer in the man's sexual partners; this notion has been proved incorrect. The current excuses are that failure to remove the foreskin may contribute to urinary tract infections and penile cancer, but neither of these contentions has been proved. Even if either were correct, the risk of urinary tract infection in an uncircumcised infant is only one in one hundred. Performing 100 mutilative surgeries to possibly prevent one treatable urinary tract infection is not valid preventive medicine - it is just another excuse. Penile cancer occurs in older men at the rate of approximately 1 in 100,000. The idea of performing 100,000 mutilating (by definition) procedures on newborns to possibly prevent cancer in one elderly man is absurd. Applying this type of reasoning to women would lead to the conclusion that removing all breasts at puberty should be done to prevent breast cancer. ["Unnecessary Circumcision", George C. Denniston, M.D., M.P.H.]
For more information visit doctorsopposingcircumcision.orgOct 25, 2004 | Dollars & Crosses
From Our Oldest Enemy: A History of America's Disastrous Relationship with France by John J. Miller and Mark Molesky:
...The tale of Franco-American harmony is a long-standing and pernicious myth. The French attitude toward the United States consistently has been one of cultural suspicion and dislike, bordering at times on raw hatred, as well as diplomatic friction that occasionally has erupted into violent hostility. France is not America's oldest ally, but its oldest enemy.
The true story of Franco-American relations begins many years before the American Revolution, during the French and Indian Wars. Lasting nearly a century, these conflicts pitted the French and their Indian comrades against seventeenth- and eighteenth-century American colonists. French military officers used massacres as weapons of imperial terror against the hardy men, women, and children who settled on the frontier. At the age of twenty-two, George Washington nearly fell victim to one of these brutal onslaughts and was reviled in France as a murderous villain for many years (an opinion sustained by French propaganda and reversed only when the American Revolution made it politically necessary). Amid this tumult, the first articulations of a recognizably American national consciousness came into being. Indeed, America's first authentic sense of self was born not in a revolt against Britain, but in a struggle with France.
Although the French provided American colonial rebels with crucial assistance during their bid for independence, direct French military intervention came only after the Americans had achieved a decisive victory on their own at Saratoga. The French crown regarded the principles of the Declaration of Independence as abhorrent and frightening. French aristocrats viewed Lafayette with contempt and branded him a criminal for traveling to America against King Louis XVI's explicit command. The king and his government overcame their revulsion to the young republic only because they sniffed an opportunity to weaken their ancient rival Britain. To be sure, France did become an ally to the colonists for a few years in the late 1770s and early 1780s when American sovereignty served French geopolitical aims. But then the French believed that double-dealing against their erstwhile friends after Yorktown served their interests as well. During the peace talks, France sought to limit American gains because it feared the new nation might become too powerful. If the French had achieved all of their objectives in the Treaty of Paris in 1783, the United States today might be confined to a slender band of territory along the eastern seaboard, like a North American version of Chile...
