Peace = War

The pro-terrorist cabal just gained a new conspirator--counter-culture author Kurt Vonnegut:

[D]iscussing his views with The Weekend Australian, Vonnegut said it was "sweet and honourable" to die for what you believe in, and rejected the idea that terrorists were motivated by twisted religious beliefs.

"They are dying for their own self-respect," he said. "It's a terrible thing to deprive someone of their self-respect. It's like your culture is nothing, your race is nothing, you're nothing."

Asked if he thought of terrorists as soldiers, Vonnegut, a decorated World War II veteran, said: "I regard them as very brave people, yes."

He equated the actions of suicide bombers with US president Harry Truman's 1945 decision to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.

On the Iraq war, he said: "What George Bush and his gang did not realise was that people fight back."

Vonnegut suggested suicide bombers must feel an "amazing high". He said: "You would know death is going to be painless, so the anticipation - it must be an amazing high."

Vonnegut's comments are sharply at odds with his reputation as a peace activist and his distinguished war service.

Proving again they're not anti-war; they just hate the United States. Under the banner of peace and pacifism, they cheer the enemy and wish us dead. Mere critique isn't the question; and they're well past appeasement. Rather, Vonnegut joins Code Pink, Ted Rall and Michael Moore as unpatriotic and anti-American.

More:

Michael Yon's got photos of Iraqis gone missing from the MSM.

(via Best of the Web, My Vast Right Wing Conspiracy)

Good News for Paris Hilton

Using a hidden video camera, high school student Jason Smith secretly taped consensual sexual relations with his girlfriend, a student at the same school. After the pair split, Smith circulated copies to classmates by email. The ex sued anonymously, seeking damages for invasion of privacy under 18 U.S.C. § 2511(a), covering anyone who "intentionally intercepts, endeavors to intercept, or procures any other person to intercept or endeavor to intercept, any wire, oral, or electronic communication." The trial judge concluded taping wasn't an "interception," and dismissed the suit.

That decision was reversed today (Doe v. Smith, No. 05-1903 (7th Cir. Nov. 21, 2005)), in an opinion written by Judge Frank Easterbrook for a unanimous three judge panel. The court reasoned voyeuristic video intercepted. . . well, something:

This defined term “means the aural or other acquisition of the contents of any wire, electronic, or oral communication through the use of any electronic, mechanical, or other device.” 18 U.S.C. § 2510(4). If Doe and Smith engaged in “oral communication” in Smith’s bedroom, then its acquisition by a video recorder—an “electronic . . . device”—is covered.

Easterbrook also directed the district judge on remand to "revisit the question whether the plaintiff should be allowed to proceed anonymously. The judge granted her application to do so without discussing this circuit’s decisions, which disfavor anonymous litigation." However, as Howard Bashman discovered, "Doe's" own lawyer blew his client's cover in his Rule 26.1 Statement. Bashman observes:

[I]t is worth pondering who bears responsibility when an electronically-filed document (such as the Brief for Appellant in this case) reveals the identity of the appellant proceeding under a court-approved pseudonym and the document is posted, in unredacted form, online at the federal appellate court's website.

Translation: whether or not "Doe" recovers from Smith, she's got a second shot--for invasion of privacy (and malpractice) by her lawyer.

Demonizing DeLay

Former Federal Election Commission Chair Bradley Smith explains why the Dems' Tom DeLay witch-hunt will fail (today's WSJ, subscription only):

Here are the basic facts: Texans for a Republican Majority (TRMPAC) is a political action committee which Mr. DeLay helped organize. According to the indictments, in September 2002 six corporations contributed $155,000 to TRMPAC, which then contributed $190,000 to the Republican National State Elections Committee (RNSEC -- an arm of the Republican National Committee). The RNSEC later contributed $190,000 to seven candidates for the Texas House of Representatives. The indictment claims that is "money laundering" by Mr. DeLay and his associates, since Texas law prohibits corporate donations to state political campaigns. And much has been made of the fact that Mr. Earle attached to the indictment a copy of TRMPAC's check to the RNSEC -- as if it were damning evidence uncovered after thorough investigation.

That is hardly the case: The contribution is readily available public information, reported by the RNSEC in its 2002 monthly reports to the Federal Election Commission. So what is going on? Here we need to take a step back and look at federal law as it existed before the McCain-Feingold campaign finance legislation, which took effect in November 2002 -- after the contributions named in Mr. Earle's indictment.

The place to begin is with national political parties, which raise money in all 50 states and spend money supporting state and local candidates in all 50 states. Before McCain-Feingold, both the Republican and the Democratic parties routinely accepted "soft money" (from corporations and unions, plus large individual contributions) from Texas and other states where corporate funds could not be contributed to candidates. National parties were free to spend soft money on party administration, advertising on issues of importance to the party, and also to send it back to state and local candidates in the more than 20 states that allow corporate contributions. At the same time, national parties also received contributions of "hard money," consisting of smaller individual contributions. Hard money, kept in separate accounts, was also sent back to state candidates -- in all states.

There was thus a constant flow of hard and soft money (the latter including corporate contributions) to the national party committees, some of which was sent back to state candidates. Indeed, during the 1990s the DNC developed a "tally" system in part to see that soft money contributed to the DNC from a given state was roughly offset by the hard money contributions from the DNC in that state.

Before McCain-Feingold, no state, to my knowledge, had ever held that this practice violated laws against corporate contributions to candidates. No one considered a common practice such as this to be "money laundering" any more than you would think that you and your bank had conspired to "launder" money when you deposited your paycheck in the bank, and the bank later loaned you money to buy a car. . .

To summarize, the theory against Mr. DeLay goes something like this: Corporations made legal contributions to TRMPAC; and then TRMPAC made a legal contribution of this soft money to the RNSEC, which, as required by federal law, kept the funds in a separate account. The RNSEC then used an account containing individual contributions (hard money) to make otherwise legal contributions to 42 candidates for state or local office in Texas, including seven who may have been specifically recommended to them by Mr. DeLay and others. Somehow this series of legal transactions constitutes money laundering.

Two questions result. First, is it "laundering" when the law specifically allows corporate contributions to be used for administrative costs, and a party or PAC uses individual contributions thereby freed up to make increased candidate contributions? Second, even if so, in light of the unprosecuted and public ubiquity of the practice, on both state and federal levels, is it consistent with basic due process to now charge Mr. DeLay and his associates with a crime for which the possible penalties include life imprisonment?

DeLay did nothing unlawful--unless the lefty campaign to criminalize conservatism succeeds.

Scenes from a Blue State

Kate Thornton Buzicky is a student at Harvard Law School. Unusually, she's also a First Lieutenant in the United States Army, thus qualifying for the endangered species list:

At places like Harvard, the military is a rarity on campus. One January morning last year, I was sitting outside a classroom with some classmates waiting for our Civil Procedure exam to begin. A male student stopped to greet us. He was wearing a puffy vest over what looked like. an old version of the Army physical training sweatshirt--the oatmeal gray cotton zip-up. I asked him if it was an Army sweatshirt (the vest covered his chest where the "ARMY" logo would be). "No way," he scoffed. "I would never wear that. I hate the Army."

"Oh," I replied, "I am in the Army." He looked at me as if I had announced I had three legs and was born on Neptune. "You? In the Army?" He started to laugh, as if I were making a joke. But when I offered to show him my military ID card as proof he finally seemed to believe me.

As a result, Ms. Buzicky's on the front line of phony liberal tolerance:

I am proud to serve, and I am proud to put my beliefs aside when duty requires it; many civilians don't seem able to understand this.

Service is an everyday thing; it means that an individual regularly sacrifices for the good of the whole. Sometimes that sacrifice is trivial (maybe I would like to wear bigger pearl earrings with those Class As, but I don't) and sometimes it is serious, such as complying with the regulations that govern political activity among Army Officers. In both situations, soldiers forgo a privilege in the name of a bigger purpose--serving their fellow citizens.

I never ask that my fellow liberals agree with me, just that they respect my sense of obligation and professional duty. But at Harvard, that's a tough sell. Here, the emphasis is on the individual--the "me", the "I," and the "mine." It is difficult to explain a group obligation to people who idolize the first person singular.

But the most difficult part of the recruiting period has been learning the limits of liberal tolerance. It has been uncomfortable to see that the lessons I learned from the traditional liberal platform appear not to apply to me.

In liberal strong-holds from Cambridge Massachusetts to Cambridge England, tolerance "is a lighter yoke when one excludes adversaries from the start--and tolerate only those with whom one already agrees."

More Middle-East Karaoke

Last month, I highlighted Britain's Royal Dragoon Guard (based in Al Faw in southern Iraq) performing Show Me the Way To Amarillo, written years ago by Neil Sedaka but a recent surprise U.K. hit when comedian Peter Kay used Tony Christie's version in his latest video.

Not to be out-done, Dutch troops in Afghanistan did a copy-cat Amarillo. But the "senior service" retaliated: Don't miss copious "air guitar" as the Royal Navy rhapsodizes Bohemia, all five minutes fifty seconds of it.

More:

A bit off topic, but check out two Chinese students in their dorm lip-syncing to the Backstreet Boys.

(via reader Doug J. and The Corner)

Press Bias # LXIV

The essence of unfair bias is treating similarly situated persons differently. See Melody Music v. F.C.C., 345 F.2d 730, 732 (D.C. Cir. 1965). The media flunks that criterion, repeatedly guilty of coming in like a lion for Republicans and conservatives but likening liberal Democrats to lambs. Today's example was penned by professors Lee Epstein and Jeffrey Segal, authors of Advice and Consent: The Politics of Judicial Appointments. Their lead story in the Washington Post's "Opinion" section, about the predicting Supreme Court votes based on the ideology or "label" of each Justice, dispels any doubt about their distortions:

As it turns out, those labels often convey useful information about how nominees, upon ascending to the high court, approach the cases before them. At the time of Scalia's nomination in 1986, virtually all the commentary -- on the left and the right -- predicted that he would be quite conservative. That forecast proved accurate. Scalia now reaches right-of-center decisions in almost seven out of every 10 cases he considers. Likewise, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, assessed as moderate-to-liberal when she was picked in 1993, votes precisely as that label would suggest, reaching liberal outcomes in about two-thirds of the court's cases.

Got that? Voting to the "right" almost 70 percent of the time is "quite conservative." By contrast, a Justice who votes "left" in "about" 67 percent of the cases is "moderate-to-liberal." What a difference 3 percent makes when comparing Scalia and Ginsburg.

I pity the fool who reads only the MSM.

All Arabs Aren't America's Enemies

Good news from Amman Jordan:

At least 200,000 persons demonstrated yesterday against the recent bombings of three luxury hotels, while a new online statement attributed to terrorist leader Abu Musab Zarqawi defended the attacks and threatened to cut off the head of Jordan's King Abdullah II.

An anti-terrorist demonstration of such size is unprecedented in the Arab world, where Zarqawi, his mentor, Osama bin Laden, and their al Qaeda organization have attained folk-hero status among Muslim masses.

"Zarqawi, from Amman, we say to you: 'You are a coward,'" protesters chanted while brandishing banners with the names of their tribes from every part of Jordan.

Battling terrorists, one at a time, will beat terrorism. Jordanians understand; too bad Dems don't.

(via LGF)