For the next 2-3 days I will probably limit myself to the Positivity Post plus the AM Coffee post. I might split the AM Coffee post into 2-3 pieces to be spread throughout the day. This matter and other things are intervening.

Wow.

Al-Qaeda conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui testified Monday that he and would-be shoe bomber Richard Reid were supposed to hijack a fifth airplane on Sept. 11, 2001, and fly it into the White House.

Moussaoui’s testimony on his own behalf stunned the courtroom as he disclosed details he had never revealed before. It was in stark contrast to Moussaoui’s previous statements in which he said the White House attack was to come later if the United States refused to release a radical Egyptian sheik imprisoned on earlier terrorist convictions.

And the reason he would be lying is ….. ?

UPDATE: Here’s an AP story.

Charles Murray proposed this last week on the subscription side of The Wall Street Journal, and it rotated into OpinionJournal.com yesterday.

His plan to replace the welfare state, is radical, initially repugnant I am sure to many, appears to have significant moral gaps, and lacks quite a few details. But it grows on you, and could be the best idea out there to prevent the entitlements train wreck:

This much is certain: The welfare state as we know it cannot survive. No serious student of entitlements thinks that we can let federal spending on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid rise from its current 9% of gross domestic product to the 28% of GDP that it will consume in 2050 if past growth rates continue. The problems facing transfer programs for the poor are less dramatic but, in the long term, no less daunting; the falling value of a strong back and the rising value of brains will eventually create a class society making a mockery of America’s ideals unless we come up with something more creative than anything that the current welfare system has to offer.

So major change is inevitable–and Congress seems utterly unwilling to face up to it. Witness the Social Security debate of last year, a case study in political timidity. Like it or not, we have several years to think before Congress can no longer postpone action. Let’s use it to start thinking outside the narrow proposals for benefit cuts and tax increases that will be Congress’s path of least resistance.

The place to start is a blindingly obvious economic reality that no one seems to notice: This country is awash in money. America is so wealthy that enabling everyone to have a decent standard of living is easy. We cannot do it by fiddling with the entitlement and welfare systems–they constitute a Gordian Knot that cannot be untied. But we can cut the knot. We can scrap the structure of the welfare state.

Instead of sending taxes to Washington, straining them through bureaucracies and converting what remains into a muddle of services, subsidies, in-kind support and cash hedged with restrictions and exceptions, just collect the taxes, divide them up, and send the money back in cash grants to all American adults. Make the grant large enough so that the poor won’t be poor, everyone will have enough for a comfortable retirement, and everyone will be able to afford health care. We’re rich enough to do it.

And Murray is only about 5 years ahead of a problem that may become intractable not long after that:

….. There are many ways of turning these economic potentials into a working system. The one I have devised–I call it simply “the Plan” for want of a catchier label–makes a $10,000 annual grant to all American citizens who are not incarcerated, beginning at age 21, of which $3,000 a year must be used for health care. Everyone gets a monthly check, deposited electronically to a bank account. If we implemented the Plan tomorrow, it would cost about $355 billion more than the current system. The projected costs of the Plan cross the projected costs of the current system in 2011. By 2020, the Plan would cost about half a trillion dollars less per year than conservative projections of the cost of the current system. By 2028, that difference would be a trillion dollars per year.

He claims to have answers to the devilish details in his book.

The idea may be the equivalent of the flat tax in the fiscal policy arena; everyone likes to talk about it, but no one will risk their political career and take up the banner.

But the status quo alternative is an inevitable march towards the nearly impossible problems of Germany and France.

Murray’s idea deserves serious consideration.
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UPDATE: Max Borders interviews Murray at TCS Daily.

In a goose-bump inducing display of courage (video here; transcript is also available at link), Arab-American Psychiatrist Wafa Sultan tells a Muslim cleric that “There is No Clash of Civilizations but a Clash between the Mentality of the Middle Ages and That of the 21st Century.”

The woman is marvelous, and says what has needed to be said for a long time.

S.O.B. Alliance member href=”http://porkopolis.blogspot.com”>Porkopolis also links and excerpts a great Townhall column by Mona Charen, perhaps the most underrated conservative columnist in punditry today.

Go there.

I don’t suppose it would be rude to point out something about his picture from yesterday’s demonstration in LA that could indicate that maybe assimilation, or even co-existence, was not uppermost on eveyone’s minds:

Take a look at the far right. Here’s a blowup:

If it’s still not registering, it says “THIS IS STOLEN LAND.”
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UPDATE: Michelle Malkin has more (and better) pics. Michelle also notes that Tammy Bruce claimed this morning on Fox News that American flags were burned at the LA rally.

Free Links:

• This Terror Tactic Would Unite a Country pretty quickly (HT S.O.B. Alliance member Large Bill).
• Yes I’m Flogging Somebody’s Book — and no, I haven’t read it. How’s that for brutal honesty? No matter, because what I have visited often enough to appreciate is Joanne Jacobs’ blog, which focuses on education issues, and does so in a way the average person can relate to.
  Joanne has a new new book, “Our School: The Inspiring Story of Two Teachers, One Big Idea and the School That Beat the Odds.” It’s about a college-prep charter high school for “at risk” kids in San Jose that (mostly) succeeds. I’ve read the reviews at Amazon, and it seems that if you’re a conscientious educator, especially one in a high-poverty area, and want to make things better, whether or not you’re in a charter-school setting, it would be well worth the investment.

• Of all the objections to evolving elections technology, the one that I believe merits the most attention is the concern about the presence or lack of an audit trail. A town in New Hampshire (HT Techdirt) had problems when the vote-tallying technology threw out ballots with multiple votes, even though multiple votes were allowed — i.e., a major programming error. I’m not in the camp that believes things are presently out of control, but the potential is there, and to pretend it’s not is disingenuous at best, and an open invitation to fraud at worst. Would the New Hampshire problem have been caught without a paper trail? Maybe, maybe not.
  If you believe is tinfoil material, think these four steps through:
  1. Open Excel, enter a series of numbers and then enter a summation formula below them.
  2. Then go in and change the formula to the “Sum” plus 1. Any programmer can do the same thing in a more complicated situation.
  3. Ask yourself how many people would (or could) catch this if you handed them a report with the error in it. Then ask yourself how many people would try to recreate what you just did if you refused to show them your original “programming” (the cell entries and the formula).
  4. Finally, ask yourself, “What are the chances I would get caught if my list had thousands or millions of entries, and I had just told everyone from the beginning to “just trust me” (as the e-voting companies appear in some cases to be insisting on), and produced no paper or othewise auditable trail?

  This is not pleasant, needs to be handled, and surely should not be an ideological issue. Related story: A voter group has sued to block Diebold’s unexpected e-voting approval by the California Secretary of State. The story says he had rejected Diebold previously, set conditions for possible reconsideration, but then whipped through the approval without the conditions being met. Ugh.

• Speaking of secret processes that are out of control:
  

  SAT Problems Even Larger Than Reported

  The College Board disclosed yesterday that the problems resulting from the misscoring of its October SAT examination were larger than it had previously reported.

  In a statement, the organization said it discovered last weekend that 27,000 of the 495,000 October tests had not been rechecked for errors. It said that after checking those exams and one other overlooked set, it had found that 400 more students than previously reported had received scores that were too low.

  A board official added that the maximum error was 450 points, not 400.

  This is the third time in two weeks that the board, which administers the exam, has acknowledged that its earlier assessment of the problems was wrong. In its statement, the board also outlined steps it planned to avoid mistakes.

  The College Board needs to hire an outside auditing firm on a ongoing basis to, at a minimum, prove that all the verfication it thought had been done was indeed done, and on top of that to statistically sample supposedly “blessed” test results, before issuing them.

• Does writing a book about a video game and how to play it better violate copyright law (HT Techdirt)? Public Citizen is striking back with a lawsuit against the makers of World of Warcraft, who have tried to prevent the creator of a gamer’s guidebook from selling it.
• Another Day, Another Delay — This time it’s Microsoft’s upgrade to its Office Suite.

Kristen Holloway of Pittsburgh, PA has done a lot:

(more…)

Free-marketeers of the world must be pinching themselves this morning: 11th seeded George Mason University is in the Final Four, defeating top-seeded Connecticut in overtime after easily handling Wichita State on Friday.

How I wish I would have bet based on my post last Monday:

To get to the Final Four, the Patriots will have to beat another cinderella team, Wichita State, and then either Washington or national Number 1 UConn. Very tough, but after what they did in their two games this weekend, you don’t want to bet against them.

Anyone who claims that they had The Patriots in their Final Four bracket from the start is either a GMU grad or seriously fibbing.

Congrat to the Pats. It’s Florida Friday, and if victorious, the winner of UCLA-LSU. That does not look impossible.
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UPDATE: This is funny (though probably not to this summer’s students) — An applause statement to the GMU men’s basketball team from last Friday combined with a tuition increase announcement:

On the eve of the George Mason men’s basketball team’s next game in the 2006 NCAA tournament, the university’s Board of Visitors (BOV) offered its best congratulations and wishes to Coach Jim Larranaga in the form of a “Resolution of Appreciation.”

….. In other action, the BOV approved a hike in tuition and fees for the upcoming summer school semester. The changes are as follows: 7.9 percent increase for in-state and out-of-state undergraduate and graduate students; 10.3 percent increase for in-state law students; and 4.1 percent increase for out-of-state law students.

Definitely not compassionate capitalism.