Noteworthy Net-Worthies:

I suppose someone’s going to try to make hay out of the FBI “revelations” that Saddam Hussein claimed to have been bluffing about having weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) because he was more afraid of Iran than anyone else.

First, just because the country was being run by a madman doesn’t mean he had a detailed knowledge of or control of everything occurring under him.

Second, this is was Saddam, who killed thousands of Kurds in gas attacks; emptied marshlands, displacing thousands; and killed enough Iraqi people from time to time (without, ahem, ever admitting it) to fill 270 mass grave sites. Now we’re supposed to believe that a guy like this would “of course” level with the FBI, instead of, oh, perhaps thinking (see Item 1) that he had safely shipped his WMDs to Syria during the needless months of dithering at the UN.

Third, the late Saddam’s statements don’t alter the reality of media-reported specific findings of actual WMDs, findings which have never been refuted.

Fourth, those statements don’t refute an official finding that certain items found in Iraq qualify as WMDs.

Fifth, there’s this “little” matter of 550 metric tons of yellowcake uranium, which IBDeditorials.com calmly noted is “the stuff that can be refined into nuclear weapons or nuclear fuel.”

Multiple sources show that there WERE WMDs in Iraq during and after the time going to war was being considered. The Left’s tired whining that there were NO WMDs in Iraq (not “a few”; not “no significant stockpiles of”; not “inconsequential quantities of”) was, has been, still is, and shall ever be a lie.

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An updated “word problem,” in the spirit of “Fun With Numbers“:

Problem: Chrysler sold 68,297 vehicles in June during 25 selling days. The average number of dealers during month, considering that 800 of them were forced to close their doors on June 9, was 2,600 (about 3,200 at the beginning of June, and about 2,400 after June 9). How many vehicles did the average Chrysler dealer sell per selling day in June?

Answer: 1.05 (68,297 ÷ 25 ÷ 2,600 = 1.05), barely up from 0.95 in May, even with going-out-of-business pricing at the terminated dealers.

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Read it and seethe — Jim Tarbox is a terminated Chrysler dealer who is still appealing his termination in the courts. Based on data in the article, his sales figure per selling day, at 1.23 (750 divided by roughly 305 selling days in a year divided by two dealerships), was well above the pre-termination average of 0.95 noted above — and he sold high-profit Jeeps.

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Quick primer on whose side to root for in Honduras — Code Pink is there, supporting Zelaya, who was ousted legally after attempting to consolidate his power illegally.

Not long ago, Code Pink leader Medea Benjamin, fresh from her group’s defeat and our troops’ victory in Iraq, sponsored a “Reality Tour” of Iran (you can’t make this stuff up), the purpose of which was to inform us that the Supreme Leader who literally calls all the shots and his puppet-thugs like Ahmadenijad really aren’t such bad guys.

The Code Pink-ometer indicates that those who want to keep Zelaya out of power in Honduras are clearly in the right. President Obama’s position in the matter is also Code Pink’s.

Update: For those who need a primer on why the Hondurans are right to keep Zelaya away, and why Code Pink, Barack Obama, and the 2004 State Department during Bush 43′s presidency are and were all wrong, Mary Anastasia O’Grady’s Wall Street Journal column today provides a quick catch-up.

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What’s the only difference between those who sell their wares in the world’s oldest profession perversion and Washington Post publisher Katharine Weymouth? Their price tag.

Oh. So. Predictable – Both what is happening, and how it is being “covered.”

Chrysler is barely out of bankruptcy, and there is already concern as to whether the money Uncle Sam, (i.e., U.S. taxpayers) funneled into the company — while in the process of ripping off and intimidating its secured creditors, capriciously terminating plants and dealers, and running roughshod over long-held notions of fiduciary duty — will be enough.

Beyond that, how many people know that the magical technology its new owner Fiat, which put no money of its own into the deal, is “more than a year away” from making its way to Chrysler?

“Somehow,” the Associated Press’s Obamacized news prioritizers decided that the info nuggets contained in the previous two paragraphs should be relegated to the final paragraphs of an unbylined report (also saved at host) this afternoon. The report, including its headline (“Chrysler names remaining directors to new board”), appeared to be merely a droll recitation concerning certain Board members. Only readers getting to the last three of the report’s eight paragraphs would have any idea that Chrysler’s situation is already a cause for renewed concern about its viability.

Readers here can make what they will of the Board’s make-up, but, as noted, the real beef in the AP story is in those final paragraphs (bolds are mine):

….. Chrysler emerged from bankruptcy protection after just 42 days, cleansed of much of its debt and labor costs. But with sales down 46 percent from the first half of last year – a year in which Chrysler lost $8 billion – the company faces a huge challenge to make money again under its new Italian owner.

Fiat, which has taken over running Chrysler, will provide badly needed small-car and small-displacement engine technology, but that’s more than a year away.

Chrysler’s poor June performance also casts doubt on whether the U.S. government’s $7 billion allocation will be enough to get the automaker through the U.S. sales slump, which is projected to last into next year. The government has said it stress-tested the $7 billion figure and determined that it is all Chrysler will need to make it until Fiat products arrive and Marchionne can turn the company around.

At the tail-end of its effort to keep Chrysler’s emergence from bankruptcy intact, government lawyers shrieked that the company was losing $100 million “every day its plants are closed,” and that the courts had to set bothersome concerns like centuries of contract law and the U.S. Constitution aside because of the dire situation they had contrived. Assuming that the government’s $100 mil/day claim was a cash burn rate that won’t change, the company will go through its $7 billion “allocation” in less than 2-1/2 months. Even under a supposedly lower cost structure implying a smaller burn rate, it’s hard to see how the company gets very far into next year — let alone to the “well over a year from now” arrival of Fiat’s supposed magic, when Marchionne finally starts “turn(ing) the company around” (though he is on the Board, will he just let it sit there and rot in the meantime?) — while it sells over 60% fewer vehicles than it did just two years ago.

The Obama administration can talk about “stress tests” all it wants, but with an economy heading towards 10% or worse unemployment and a large portion of American consumers clearly shunning the bailed-out pair of Chrysler and General Motors, it looks more than a little likely that Chrysler will come begging for more taxpayer money in some form yet again, or yet again threaten to grind to a halt.

Oh. So. Predictable.

Exit question 1: Will a post-bankruptcy GM be Chrysler writ much larger?

Exit question 2: What are the chances taxpayers are going to get to see meaningful and timely financial statements from either of their new “investments”?

Smart-aleck question: How much more will Chrysler burn through every day once its plants reopen?

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

I can certainly appreciate these lighter and spot-on accurate moments from John Boehner.

“Bloodhounds“:

Part 1 (“The Big Picture”) is here.

Quick:

1. Which company sold the most light trucks in the U.S. in June?
2. Which company came in at Number 9 in car sales in June, down from Number 7 a year ago?
3. Aren’t smaller players in the auto industry obviously gaining ground on the big guys because of their small, fuel-efficient cars?

If you don’t know the answers to these questions, it’s because the press has been doing a poor job of covering what’s really been going on in the industry since the Era of the (Failed) Auto Company Bailouts began in December of last year.

Answers to the three questions are in the charts that follow:

(Source Data: Wall Street Journal monthly Auto Sales Chart for June 2009 and June 2008)

The answers to the three questions are as follows:

1. (in white on blue above) In June, Ford sold more light trucks than General Motors for the first time in many, many years. Just a year ago, GM had a lead on Ford of over 50%.
2. (in black on yellow) In June, Chrysler was the Number 9 seller of cars in the U.S. Even a year ago, it was only Number 7, miles behind the top five in the category, and even badly trailing Hyundai. In the past year, Kia has passed Chrysler and established a bit of distance. VW outsold Chrysler during June, for the first time in probably forever — and remember that this was a month when the 25% of dealers that were terminated had going-out-of-business deals going. It seems more than a little likely that BMW will catch Chrysler in the coming months.
3. (in white on green, for irony) While many of the larger makers have focused their efforts on smaller cars, the rest of the pack, contrary to established non-wisdom, has made significant inroads in generally higher-profit light trucks. While light truck sales at the six biggest players are off over 25% in the past year, the smaller players are down less than 9%.

If the establishment press was doing its job covering the industry, the first two items would be widely-known stories. The third, though a bit less obvious, certainly throws into doubt the conventional wisdom that going small is the ticket to success.

Other developments that bear watching include:

• Given Chrysler’s dealer terminations, Toyota may soon overtake Chrysler in truck sales. Honda might catch up and pass both.
• Ford has a shot at overtaking Honda in car sales.
• Toyota is perilously close to surrendering its lead to GM as Number 1 in monthly car sales.

The last item just noted is the only one in either of the two posts about the industry situation that is even remotely favorable to GM. If it comes to pass accompanied by heavy press coverage, it will be further proof (as if we really need any) that the press is firmly on the side of the failed bailout attempts, never mind the wreckage they have inflicted on the economy, the rule of law, and on people who didn’t deserve it.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

Note: This originally appeared at Pajamas Media and was teased at BizzyBlog on Friday.

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What do Iran, China, and the U.S. have in common? More than you might think.

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How’s that “The Revolution will be televised, blogged and twittered” thing going in Iran? Or the “Web 2.0 will us set free” mantra?

Oh. I see. Not so well.

Supreme Leader Khamenei, who really runs everything in that country, and his pseudo-”elected” lackey, Mahmound Ahmadinejad, have gained a firm upper hand in putting down the Iranian resistance to the rigged election in particular and its repressive society in general.

It turns out that the bad guys know technology, and, when threatened, can be particularly adept at thwarting their opponents’ use of it.

The first and most obvious strategy is to keep pictures out of the news. The Associated Press reports that “Iranian authorities have barred journalists for international news organizations from reporting on the streets and ordered them to stay in their offices.” Another tactic is to hinder the opponents’ organizing efforts. While Iran’s opposition leader and putative election loser is putting on a brave face, the Supreme Leader’s thugs “have arrested most of his inner circle and made it progressively harder for him to communicate with his followers.”

Meanwhile, the death of Neda has been swept from American and world viewers’ short-term memory banks, replaced by almost pathologically obsessive coverage of the death of “Nada,” (as in, “nada in the way of meaningful musical accomplishments since 1982“).

Perhaps President Barack Obama, assuming he even cares, is among those swept up in the absurd notion that solely with the help of technology, oppressed people will rise up, throw off their shackles, and be free, while all we have to do is watch. If it were only that easy.

Take China. For decades, the elitist notion has been that if the Chinese get a taste of and grow to relish the benefits of economic freedom, they will also clamor for and achieve personal and political freedom. The Chinese Communist government will simply one day capitulate, and all will be sweetness and light.

The government has had a different very different idea. There has been no significant sign of a legitimate change in outlook since Tiananmen – which, by the way, was also televised, with little real-world effect.

Its economic model is decidedly not based on free markets. In publicly traded Chinese corporations, the government is almost always the dominant or by far most influential owner. It is naïve to believe that the Party isn’t making or approving the vast majority of meaningful decisions at these enterprises. Oh, and by the way, they sort of own us, and they’re starting to throw their weight around.

Meanwhile, the Party has “progressively” tightened its grip on information. Since 2005, outrageously assisted by U.S.-based high-tech companies, the government’s smiley-faced police-state apparatus has clamped down on blogs, Internet news, web sites, hosting companies, and search engines. Yahoo!, Google, MSN, and others filter searches at their Chinese affiliates. Google’s agreement to censor Chinese search engine results in early 2006 ended the credibility of that company’s signature claim that it would “do no evil.” Additionally, companies like Cisco and Fortinet have helped the government prevent access to disfavored sites.

The tech-sector protested at the time that the government’s controls would gradually go away as China’s economy and the people’s desire for freedom grew. Several years later, it’s clear that this is not happening. Instead, the government has intensified its demands for further controls. Though its plan to require the installation of censorship software on every new computer has been “delayed,” there’s little doubt that it will continue to pursue the effort. With the precedent of the search engines’ sellout, it’s hard to have any confidence that Dell, HP and others will resist.

Well, what about Web 2.0? Won’t that get around the statists in Iran and China? The Financial Times summarizes the grim situation:

That (government) stifling of web freedoms that many people around the world take for granted are being accompanied by more novel means of combating cyber opponents. Those methods range from directing stealthy technological attacks that shut down dissident websites to unleashing swarms of paid commentators to argue the government position on supposedly independent blogs.

Both carry the added attraction of deniability: many regimes are employing advanced repressive techniques that are hard to identify in action, let alone circumvent. At a time when new communication technologies, from text messaging to Twitter, promise to put greater power in the hands of the individual, these techniques are having a chilling effect. Internet experts from more open societies fear that this will lead to greater self-censorship by organisations and individuals, which they see as the most effective tool of all.

If some of the techniques described seem strangely familiar to some U.S. readers, it’s probably because they’re here – and not necessarily always in light form.

Isn’t a leftie troll in a do-nothing government job or on a “community organizer’s” payroll, with plenty of time to comment or blog, for all practical purposes a de facto “paid commentator”?

Isn’t taking in millions in small, deliberately untraceable contributions during a presidential election campaign, in clear violation of established laws – contributions that arguably enabled that candidate to drown out his opponent — eerily close to an “advanced repressive technique”?

Finally, our president and Congress are clearly attempting to move the U.S. economy sharply away from our leaning-towards capitalist model –- never mind that it is the one that it has rewarded innovation and enterprise, and has been, for all its faults, the greatest wealth creator and living standard-raiser in human history. Instead, the Obama economy is evolving into one of “gets vs. get-nots.” It benefits soulless glad-handers who can work a government-dominated patronage, grant, loan, and reward system through personal connections and/or payoffs, to the detriment of those who simply want to make a better mousetrap and better serve customers. The get vs. get-not model is one that is all too often divorced from the need to actually accomplish or build something of value. The money keeps flowing, and the accomplishment seldom if ever arrives.

As the get vs. get-not model becomes more dominant, one’s very success, failure, or even existence in business will become ever more dependent on the whims of the visibly powerful, as well as their invisible bureaucrats and apparatchiks, any one of whom might be offended by someone’s expressed opinion, political preference, or even their personal acquaintances. Isn’t the prospect of “greater self-censorship” in the name of continued business just around the corner?

Americans, and especially their political leaders, need to remind themselves that freedom isn’t free; that its triumph and preservation are not guaranteed; and that technology isn’t automatically going to make getting or preserving it any easier.

We are now six months into the failed Auto Bailout Era. Looking at the industry’s four biggest companies, it has become clear that Ford is on the rise, General Motors continues to slip badly, Chrysler is fading into minor-player status, and Toyota’s ongoing struggles continue.

In May, after April’s sales results came out, two Associated Press writers noted Ford’s ascendancy and uniquely hinted at its likely basis:

Detroit’s Big Three is becoming Ford and the other two.

While its rivals stay afloat with billions in government aid, Ford grabbed a bigger slice of the American car market in April …..

….. Most of ….. (Ford’s) gains came at the expense of General Motors and Chrysler, which unlike Ford are dependent on federal help.

Other than that, there has been virtually no press recognition of what has to be seen as the most likely reason for the shift: Enough consumers to matter are continuing to shun the unsuccessfully bailed-out.

In an industry where rivals have traditionally fought tooth and nail to pick up a point or two of market share in a full year, the changes in the industry landscape in the six months since Washington began its failed attempts to bail out now-bankrupt GM and just-emerged, absorbed-by-Fiat Chrysler have been stunning, as seen below in this comparison of the industry’s Big Four:

(Source Data: Wall Street Journal monthly Auto Sales Chart for June 2009 and June 2008; USA Today for Dec. 2008 and Dec. 2007; Web-Archived WSJ Auto Sales Chart for June 2007)

Here’s what the graphic and the accompanying numbers show:

• GM, for all its considerable cost problems and in spite of steep sales declines, actually improved its market position relative to its three largest competitors from June 2007 through December 2008. That improvement ended and went sharply into reverse when the government began its failed bailout effort, putting the company back to where it was two years ago and trending in the wrong direction.
• During most of 2006, all of 2007, and early 2008, Ford’s share of Big 4 unit sales suffered. The company was in the midst of pretending to ignore what I have called “the biggest boycott never reported” by a pro-family group. That boycott began in March 2006, and ended in March 2008. After that and until the end of 2008, Ford’s situation relative to the other three companies improved a bit. But in the six months since failed bailout money has freely flowed to GM and Chrysler, Ford has cut GM’s Big 4 market share lead from almost 14 points to a mere 5.
• Chrysler, which was sold to a private equity group in March 2007, and suffered terribly at the hands of Bob Nardelli, whose stated mission was to cut costs and dress the company up for sale. With the help of high gas prices in early 2008, he only succeeded in making the company look unappealing. In the last half of 2008, the hemorrhaging of the company’s market share at least slowed down. But the decay accelerated again once government’s bailout money began to flow. Chrysler is less than 40% of the company it was just two years ago.
• Toyota began having problems of its own in mid-2008 — its market share loss during the second half of the year appears to have been GM’s gain — until the bailout money began to flow. Toyota still has significant challenges. But while it has seen Ford reclaim second place among U.S. sellers, it has gained overall Big 4 market share thanks to GM’s and Chrysler’s steep declines.

Not shown in the interest of avoiding over-complication: The rest of the industry has picked up about 5 points of market share at the expense of the Big 4 since the government’s failed bailout efforts began. If this development had been incorporated into the graphic and stats above, the results would have shown GM’s and Chrysler’s situations as even more desperate, Toyota treading water, and Ford making a bit less positive headway.

There’s even more to the “shunning of the bailed-out” story the press has ignored since the government’s failed efforts began. Part 2 will deal with that.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

From Monroe, Michigan:

July 4, 2009

….. (Roy) Letson, on his first venture onto Lake Erie for walleye, had left Sterling State Park in Monroe at 8 a.m. Thursday with his father-in-law, Douglas Whittaker, 76, of Eaton Rapids, and Whittaker’s friends, Larry Vert, 64, a retired Lansing accountant, and Ronnie Miller, 63, also of Eaton Rapids. All four are in Mercy Hospital in Monroe today in stable condition, hooked up to IVs to replenish fluids lost during their Lake Erie odyssey.

They’d hauled in their limit of fish, 20 fat walleye stored in coolers as they headed back to port Thursday evening.

And that’s what they think was their downfall.

“Maybe we had too much weight on the front of the boat, we had our fish up there,” Letson said. “We were all done, coming in. It was real fun, we were having a good time.”

The first wave hit, drenching the front of the boat. Then the second. And the third. The boat capsized — and took their radios and safety equipment underwater. Letson, pulled out his cell phone and held it in the air as the waves hit, trying to keep it dry. But it was either save the phone, or save himself.

He pulled himself onto the hull, what became the men’s floating island through Thursday night’s darkness.
(more…)

Note: This post is a July 4 BizzyBlog tradition. It belongs in Positivity because the sacrifices of those involved contributed to the founding of these United States.

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The news column below is, for reasons described in “Background” below, unenforceably copyright © 2000 Boston Globe, and is reposted here for discussion, critique, and educational purposes only, pursuant to the fair use exemption of copyright law.

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Also: Michelle Malkin wrote a hard-hitting piece in late July 2000 on The Globe’s immature reaction to the controversy that will be described here and the subject reporter’s outstanding body of work.

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Finally, see the “FINAL NOTE” that appears after the column.

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Background: In July 2000, veteran Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby wrote the column that appears below.

After publication, his ignorant editors (putting it kindly) felt that he should have included a line pointing out that he was far from the first to write about the fates of the Declaration’s signers. Because he hadn’t, Jacoby was suspended for four months without pay. Note that The Globe did not, because they could not, suspend him for plagiarism.

Jacoby’s full response to his suspension is here. His most important points were these:

In short, whatever-happened-to-the-signers is an old, old theme in American inspirational writing …. These stories have been repeated so often, and by so many people, that they have risen to the level of American legend. Which is why it didn’t occur to me to take up valuable space in the column with footnotes or citations to earlier versions….

…. I care greatly about accuracy. Knowing that previous treatments of the lives-of-the-signers theme contained mistakes and exaggerations, I tried to take pains not to repeat anything untrue. As best as I could given the constraints of a deadline, I double-checked the biographical information I had, using encyclopedias of American history, books on the American Revolution, and relevant web sites, such as the one at www.colonialhall.com.

Many online and print readers of Jacoby’s columns (I believe that The Globe never did tell us how many) protested his suspension, including me. My protest e-mail to the Globe’s ombudsman said, in part:

Repeat after me, sir: FACTUAL history, especially from over 200 years ago, is public domain, and once verified and researched, does not have to be attributed. Your position is akin to having to look in three dictionaries to get to the meaning of every word and then having to cite those dictionaries every single time.

Where Jacoby found this factual history, whether “in a short book … by Paul Harvey,” “……in a widely circulated e-mail,” on a paper napkin, or on toilet paper is, after the fact-checking that YOU acknowledge he did, (repeat after me) IRRELEVANT.

The Globe did not reconsider the suspension. Matt Drudge “suspended” the Boston Globe’s link at his web site during the term of Jacoby’s suspension. Many online users “suspended” The Globe by refusing to read anything it published during that time, and more than a few print readers cancelled their subscriptions.

Upon learning of the suspension, Joe Farah of World Net Daily wrote:

I have read Jacoby’s column. I have read other works that inspired it. In my professional and expert opinion, this is not plagiarism. Neither is it a close call. It is, simply, the kind of derivative journalism that we read in American newspapers every single day — online and off. Jacoby did nothing wrong.

In fact, the only thing he is guilty of is writing a first-rate Independence Day column that reminded Americans of the great sacrifice our founders made for the freedom we enjoy. And that, I suspect, is what really bugs the politically correct crowd at the Boston Globe.

Indeed. Which is why, on this Independence Day, I am posting that column, omitting additional information about Thomas Nelson Jr. that Jacoby subsequently found to be inaccurate.

So we never forget.

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Fifty-Six Great Risk-Takers
By Jeff Jacoby

On July 2, 1776, the Continental Congress voted 12-0 — New York abstained — in favor of Richard Henry Lee’s resolution “that these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States.”

On July 4, the Declaration of Independence drafted by Thomas Jefferson — heavily edited by Congress — was adopted without dissent. On July 8, the Declaration was publicly proclaimed in Philadelphia. On July 15, Congress learned that the New York Legislature had decided to endorse the Declaration. On Aug. 2, a parchment copy was presented to the Congress for signature. Most of the 56 men who put their name to the document did so that day.

And then?

We tend to forget that to sign the Declaration of Independence was to commit an act of treason — and the punishment for treason was death. To publicly accuse George III of “repeated injuries and usurpations,” to announce that Americans were therefore “Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown,” was a move fraught with danger — so much so that the names of the signers were kept secret for six months.

They were risking everything, and they knew it. That is the meaning of the Declaration’s soaring last sentence:

“And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm Reliance on the Protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.”

Most of the signers survived the war; several went on to illustrious careers.

Two of them became presidents of the United States, and among the others were future vice presidents, senators, and governors. But not all were so fortunate.

Nine of the 56 died during the Revolution, and never tasted American independence.

Five were captured by the British.

Eighteen had their homes — great estates, some of them – looted or burnt by the enemy.

Some lost everything they owned.

Two were wounded in battle.

Two others were the fathers of sons killed or captured during the war.

“Our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.” It was not just a rhetorical flourish.

We all recognize John Hancock’s signature, but who ever notices the names beneath his? William Ellery, Thomas Nelson, Richard Stockton, Button Gwinnett, Francis Lewis — to most of us, these are names without meaning.

But each represents a real human being, some of whom paid dearly “for the support of this Declaration” and American independence.

Lewis Morris of New York, for example, must have known when he signed the Declaration that he was signing away his fortune. Within weeks, the British ravaged his estate, destroyed his vast woodlands, butchered his cattle, and sent his family fleeing for their lives.

Another New Yorker, William Floyd, was also forced to flee when the British plundered his property. He and his family lived as refugees for seven years without income. The strain told on his wife; she died two years before the war ended.

Carter Braxton of Virginia, an aristocratic planter who had invested heavily in shipping, saw most of his vessels captured by the British navy. His estates were largely ruined, and by the end of his life he was a pauper.

The home of William Ellery, a Rhode Island delegate, was burned to the ground during the occupation of Newport.

Thomas Heyward Jr., Edward Rutledge, and Arthur Middleton, three members of the South Carolina delegation, all suffered the destruction or vandalizing of their homes at the hands of enemy troops. All three were captured when Charleston fell in 1780, and spent a year in a British prison.

“Our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.”

Thomas Nelson Jr. of Virginia raised $2 million for the patriots’ cause on his own personal credit. The government never reimbursed him, and repaying the loans wiped out his entire estate.

Richard Stockton, a judge on New Jersey’s supreme court, was betrayed by loyalist neighbors. He was dragged from his bed and thrown in prison, where he was brutally beaten and starved. His lands were devastated, his horses stolen, his library burnt. He was freed in 1777, but his health had so deteriorated that he died within five years. His family lived on charity for the rest of their lives.

In the British assault on New York, Francis Lewis’s home and property were pillaged. His wife was captured and imprisoned; so harshly was she treated that she died soon after her release. Lewis spent the remainder of his days in relative poverty.

And then there was John Hart. The speaker of the New Jersey Assembly, he was forced to flee in the winter of 1776, at the age of 65, from his dying wife’s bedside. While he hid in forests and caves, his home was demolished, his fields and mill laid waste, and his 13 children put to flight. When it was finally safe for him to return, he found his wife dead, his children missing, and his property decimated. He never saw any of his family again and died, a shattered man, in 1779.

The men who signed that piece of parchment in 1776 were the elite of their colonies. They were men of means and social standing, but for the sake of liberty, they pledged it all — their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor. We are in their debt to this day.

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A FINAL NOTE (originally added July 2, 2005 at 8:30 PM): A distinction needs to be made between Jacoby’s column and the contents of an e-mail that was making the rounds of the Internet in the late 1990s. That e-mail (but not Jacoby’s column) has been critiqued at the Snopes.com Urban Legends web site and deemed “Some true. Some false.” None of the falsehoods or exaggerations criticized at Snopes appear to have made their way into Jacoby’s column, and Jacoby’s column provides a few additional facts not in the e-mail that have not been addressed by Snopes or verified by me (though it should be noted that The Globe never published a correction to any of the facts presented in Jacoby’s column).

A comment about the Snopes critique: Much of their non-factual criticism revolves around what they believe is an implied claim that the Signers were specifically targeted because they signed the Declaration. The subject e-mail never makes that claim, nor does Jacoby’s column. In both cases, I don’t see how any such implication can be derived. Why Snopes devotes so much of its critique to debunking the idea of “targeting,” and why the final two non-sequitur sentences of that critique are so, well, almost immature, is bewildering, to say the least:

But we should also not lose sight of the fact that many men (and women) other than the fifty-six signers of the Declaration of Independence — some famous and most not — risked and sacrificed much (including their lives) to support the revolutionary cause. The hardships and losses endured by many Americans during the struggle for independence were not visited upon the signers alone, nor were they any less ruinous for having befallen people whose names are not immortalized on a piece of parchment.

Nobody ever said the Signers’ suffering was worse than that of others. But the Signers on average certainly had more to lose, at least materially, and they bore a special burden because they ensured that The Revolutionary War, already a year old, was about independence, and not some kind of peaceful coexistence with the British. It is my unprovable opinion that Snopes’ borderline-disrespect for the Signers comes from a deep-seated politically-correct need to minimize heroism wherever it is found.
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Sites commenting on this post in 2005:

• Uncorrelated (link no longer works)
  
• Viking Spirit (link no longer works)
• Weapons of Mass Discussion

Yeah, I’d say this is the most likely scenario:

So Occam’s Razor leaves us with: Who needs this?

In states far from the national spotlight, politics still attracts normal people. You’re a mayor or a state senator or even the governor, but you lead a normal life. The local media are tough on you, but they know you, they live where you live, they’re tough on the real you, not on some caricature cooked up by a malign alliance of late-night comics who’d never heard of you a week earlier and media grandees supposedly on your own side who pronounce you a “cancer”.

Then suddenly you get the call from Washington. You know it’ll mean Secret Service, and speechwriters, and minders vetting your wardrobe. But nobody said it would mean a mainstream network comedy host doing statutory rape gags about your 14-year old daughter. You’ve got a special-needs kid and a son in Iraq and a daughter who’s given you your first grandchild in less than ideal circumstances. That would be enough for most of us. But the special-needs kid and the daughter and most everyone else you love are a national joke, and the PC enforcers are entirely cool with it.

Most of those who sneer at Sarah Palin have no desire to live her life. But why not try to – what’s the word? – “empathize”? If you like Wasilla and hunting and snowmachining and moose stew and politics, is the last worth giving up everything else in the hopes that one day David Letterman and Maureen Dowd might decide Trig and Bristol and the rest are sufficiently non-risible to enable you to prosper in their world? And, putting aside the odds, would you really like to be the person you’d have to turn into under that scenario?

National office will dwindle down to the unhealthily singleminded (Clinton, Obama), the timeserving emirs of Incumbistan (Biden, McCain) and dynastic heirs (Bush). Our loss.

Indeed.

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UPDATE: If Sarah Poise really is leaving public life, she won’t miss crap like this.

It’s here.

It will go up here at BizzyBlog on Sunday (link won’t work until then) when the blackout expires.

Subheadline: “What do Iran, China, and the U.S. have in common? More than you might think.”

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Related: China’s police state, with whom the members of the BizzyBlog Internet Wall of Shame have been cooperating for almost four years, wants to require that a government-developed program called “Green Dam” be installed on all new computers sold in that country.

This is “1984″ arriving with full force 25 years later. It goes far, far beyond “web filtering” (which is bad enough), an understated characterization that all too many media reports are using.

This excerpt from an Epoch Times article describes Green Dam’s functions and purposes (bolds are mine):

“Green Dam-Youth Escort” was developed by Jinhui Computer Systems Inc. and Dazheng Language Process Inc., with the former in charge of image filtration and the later keyword filtration. In 2005, Dazheng was involved in the development of a “secret files intercept system” for the Chinese army. According to its Web site, Jinhui has worked with both the Chinese army and the public security ministry.

The regime says Green Dam can block pornography, filter illicit content, control web surfing time, and check browsing records. In fact, the software is capable of blocking politically sensitive websites, filtering out content based on a list of keywords, recording keystrokes and passwords, taking screenshots every 3 minutes, and recording all of the websites visited along with all of the user’s other internet activity.

….. Computer hackers in China have cracked open Green Dam’s keyword library and administrative codes.

According to the information produced by these hackers, Green Dam has 2,700 keywords relating to pornography, and 6,500 politically sensitive keywords. While these keywords include references to the Tiananmen Square massacre and Tibet, the great majority of the keywords refer to Falun Gong, the spiritual practice the Chinese regime banned and began persecuting in 1999.

….. Analysts believe that Green Dam gives the regime the ability to tighten its control by collecting personal information and secretly sending it to a central database, while strengthening the regime’s ability to censor the internet. The collected information could then be used to persecute dissidents.

In 2003 the Chinese regime launched the Golden Shield, also known as the Great Firewall of China, an internet filtering system that cost tens of billions of yuan. The Internet Freedom Consortium believes Golden Shield is the world’s most stringent web filtering system.

….. However, Golden Shield can be circumvented by such popular anti-filtering software programs as FreeGate, UltraSurf, and Garden. Green Dam can block these programs.

Chinese users of Green Dam have found that the Green-Dam injects a dll file into Internet Explorer that prohibits the usage of FreeGate. Analysts predict that Green Dam will in its future updates add code that will prohibit the usage of proxy servers, another anti-blockage technology.

The makers of Green Dam claim that, while the software will be pre-installed, users can remove it.

A mainland Chinese computer expert discovered the truth after he installed and uninstalled the screening software. He said, “When we used its [Green Dam] uninstallation program to uninstall the software, about half of Green Dam’s 110 system files continued to reside in the computer. After restarting the computer, Green Dam’s screening program is running actively in the background. The only part of the software uninstalled is its user interface.”

The expert added, “Pre-loading the screening software and providing an uninstallation program that does not actually uninstall the software is an act of coercion. Green Dam project is a coercive software.”

Green Dam was supposed to be mandatory on all new PCs shipped in China beginning on July 1, but the government “delayed” the order. Nevertheless, many new PCs are shipping with the software either installed or on an accompanying CD (note the mischaracterization of Green Dam’s range of functions):

PC makers voluntarily supply Web filter in China

Several PC makers were including controversial Internet-filtering software with computers shipped in China on Thursday despite a government decision to postpone its plan to make such a step mandatory.

Beijing’s decision this week to delay the requirement that the filtering software — known as Green Dam — by pre-installed or supplied on disk with all computers sold in China averted a possible trade clash with the United States and Europe. But the move by some makers to include the software anyway could reignite complaints by Chinese Web users.

Also Thursday, a government newspaper said regulators will revive the plan to make Green Dam mandatory at some point, a move that would disappoint opponents who hoped the government would drop the effort.

Taiwan’s Acer Inc. — the world’s third-largest PC maker — Sony Corp. and China’s Haier Group said they were shipping Green Dam on disks with computers for sale in China. Taiwan’s Asus Inc. said it was preparing to do so. Taiwanese laptop maker BenQ Inc., said the system was on the hard drives of its computers.

Acer was supplying Green Dam because disks already were packed with PCs before the government postponed the plan, that had been due to take effect Wednesday, said a company spokeswoman, Meng Lei. Other companies did not give reasons for supplying the system.

Hewlett-Packard Inc., the world’s top PC manufacturer, said it was working with the U.S. government to get more information and declined to comment further. Dell Inc., the No. 2 producer, did not immediately respond to questions about its plans.

China’s Lenovo Group, the No. 4 producer, did not immediately respond to questions, but the official China Daily newspaper said Green Dam was included with its PCs.

If the PC makers roll over on this, membership in the BizzyBlog Wall of Shame will grow substantially. I would suggest that, absent a back-down, anyone who buys a computer from a PC maker that continues to ship units with Green Dam already installed is assisting in the oppression of over a billion fellow human beings.

Contrary to naively accepted conventional wisdom, technology in and of itself is an not an automatic freedom-enhancer. In the wrong hands, especially in the absence of a robust defense of our God-given rights to free expression, speech, and personal privacy, it’s clearly a serious threat.

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UPDATE, 5:20 p.m. — A related post is at NewsBusters.

From Afghanistan (HT Instapundit):

July 1, 2009

For several nights he has walked down an empty, wooden hallway partially lit by a mixture of moonlight and a spotlight off in the distance, stopping sporadically to observe different sections of the structure. After he moves on, he leaves the building as calm as it was when he found it.

Being at a construction site before anyone else arrives is a nightly routine for Navy Petty Officer 2nd Class Landon Church, an electrician from Naval Mobile Construction Battalion-5.

Church, a native of Byron, Mich., is the project lead electrician in building the combat operation centers here. Since March, his knowledge and experience have been essential in the progress made here by Marine Expeditionary Brigade-Afghanistan and its subordinate elements.

“This has been the opportunity of a lifetime,” Church said. “I knew in the beginning that the MEB project was crucial to the beginning of operations here and it has been an honor to head up and manage the electrical portions of the project.”

Church, 24, has less than four years in the Navy and is in charge of planning and estimating the electrical requirements of the three buildings.

He and his team of four electricians completed the electrical portions of the brigade’s command center less than two weeks ago and installed more than 10,000 feet of wiring throughout the building that will run power to hundreds of computers, telephones and more.

“I spent many hours reviewing building codes for electrical components and making sure I had an overall knowledge of every aspect of the project, down to the very last detail,” Church said. “With that knowledge, I had the best idea of how to go about tasking, coordinating and managing my troops.”

Church was trained as an electrician in Wichita Falls, Texas, from May to July 2006. It was then where he learned about electrical distribution and interior wiring, motors and controls, and how to climb utility poles and troubleshoot electrical problems.

From Texas he was then sent to his current duty station at Port Hueneme, Calif., and deployed to Kuwait from September to November 2006, and later to eastern Afghanistan’s Camp Salerno from December 2006 to February 2007.

Nine months before coming here he was assigned to his battalion’s convoy security element. There he focused on weapons training, improvised explosive device awareness and urban combat.

Shortly after arriving here, he was handed the blue-prints for three of the largest projects he’d ever fathomed, even though he hadn’t worked as an electrician for almost a year.

“I kind of stared at the blue-prints for a while, wondering how I would ever plan this out,” Church reminisced. “I chose to push through it one item at a time, and pretty soon the plan came together and eventually evolved into one of the biggest projects the Seabees have seen in quite some time.”

Petty Officer 1st Class Garrison Hardisty, project supervisor, said he had no doubt in Church’s ability to adjust to the challenge, and proof of that is the recent completion of the MEB-Afghanistan COC.

“That’s what Seabees do, we make do with what little we have,” Hardisty said.
Church attributes his success to the hard work and commitment of the electricians in his team. He said he’s happy with the results he’s produced so far, but said that wouldn’t be the case if not for his men.

“I’ve tasked them, and they haven’t let me down yet,” Church said. “They put in the extra effort to get the mission done.” ….

Go here for the rest of the story.

They almost nail it (bold is mine):

Why is this job decline happening? The private sector — the real engine of economic and job growth — won’t hire because it’s scared of what it sees coming out of Washington.

On the horizon, as far as the eye can see, are higher taxes, uncontrolled spending and layers upon layers of new regulations.

Who would hire new workers faced with that?

But if you look more closely, you’ll understand see that the private sector has been scared for a full year of what Nancy Pelosi, Barack Obama, and Harry Reid promised to do once in power, what they have done in 5-1/2 short months, and what they are moving swiftly to do now that they are in power. Their 12-month-plus POR (Pelosi-Obama-Reid) Economy, now the POR Recession As Normal People Define It, has exacted a terrible price, yet they refuse to let up.

Given that June 2009 represents the worst June on record, this is probably the point where it’s fair to ask if these people really want a recovery. Even more important, if you still believe that they do, ask yourself “what they would they be doing any differently if they didn’t?”