Car Carnage in May:
- GM - down 28%.
- Ford - down 16%.
- Chrysler - down 25%. Has Bob Nardelli beaten Chrysler down to the point where nobody will want it?
- Toyota - down 4%. Even with the slide, the company came within 9,300 vehicles of beating out GM for #1 in unit sales.
- Honda - up 16%.
- Nissan - up 8%.

If you think this is bad, see what will happen if Chris Pummer of MarketWatch gets his wish and gas goes to $8 a a gallon. Chris says we should rejoice if that happens.

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This got lost in the shuffle last week, but it deserves a mention (HT Say Uncle via Instapundit):

Police: 3 dead in Nevada bar shooting that may have stemmed from feud
May 25, 2008 9:15 PM ET

WINNEMUCCA (AP) - Police say three men were fatally shot and two other people were injured early this morning at a bar in Winnemucca, and the shootings may have stemmed from a longstanding feud between several local families.

Winnemucca Police Chief Bob Davidson says a man entered Players Bar and Grill and fatally shot two members of a rival family before he was shot and killed by a patron. All three were pronounced dead at the scene.

Better headline: Possible Massacre Averted.

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Here’s another one of those “unexpected” good-news econ reports:

April U.S. factory orders unexpectedly jump 1.1%

U.S. factory orders unexpectedly jumped 1.1% in April 2008, the U.S. Commerce Department announced Tuesday, primarily due to increased prices for gasoline and other petroleum products.

Economists surveyed by Bloomberg News had expected April 2008 factory orders to decline 0.1%. Factory orders increased 1.5% in March 2008.

Excluding a 7.9% decline in transportation goods, factory orders rose 2.6% April 2008.

The Census Bureau’s original is here.

Related, from AP’s Martin Crutsinger:

Orders for iron and steel were up by 5.5 percent. Orders for mining and oil field equipment jumped 48.6 percent and orders for electrical equipment and appliances surged 28.1 percent.

Orders for nondurable goods rose by 2.8 percent.

If you go to Crutsinger’s second paragraph at the link, you’ll see a drop-dead obvious mistake:

The Commerce Department reported Tuesday that orders were up 1.1 percent in April following a 1.5 percent increase in March. Those gains followed big declines in January and March that raised concerns …..

Zheesh.

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California also had a primary yesterday for all relevant offices except president.

Good news for fiscal conservatives: It looks like Tom McClintock, “admired for his unyielding opposition to tax hikes,” is going to be a congressman.

Cindy Sheehan? Not so much (HT Instapundit).

To be fair, Sheehan is running for Congress against Nancy Pelosi as an Independent and wasn’t on yesterday’s ballot. Trouble is, as the link indicates, she needs 10,198 signatures, presumably of people in the congressional district, to get on the ballot in November. Rots of ruck, babe.

If she were serious instead of grabbing for one last shot at relevance, Sheehan would have run against Pelosi as a Democrat in yesterday’s primary, where she might have had a chance in a far-far-left district in a very low turnout election with a strong grass-roots/nutroots effort. Now, even if she miraculously collects enough signatures to qualify in November, she’ll get clobbered.

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Per a tip from reader Dan — RomneyCare’s fines hit home:

Nearly 100,000 Massachusetts taxpayers have been fined for failing to obtain health insurance, even as a major survey concludes the effort to create near-universal coverage in the state is meeting key goals.

Five percent of taxpayers failed to obtain health coverage last year, and more than half of those - about 97,000 - were forced to forfeit their personal exemption - worth $219 - after it was determined they could have afforded health care.

Do the math: That’s $21.2 million.

This year (collected on tax returns to be filed next year) the fines will increase to as much as $912. I would expect that one other thing will increase: the number of people leaving the People’s Republic of RomneyCare.

The Cleveland Plain Dealer apparently decided to do something wtih a story it was dragged into kicking and screaming last fall — one that it seemed at the time to be wishing would go away.

Saturday, David Briggs, the paper’s religion reporter, did something with a near non-story relating to previous events that he and his paper failed to do twice when it counted: He followed up, reporting on the difficulties a Cleveland mosque is experiencing in finding a new imam.

That contrasts starkly with how Briggs and the PD handled the story of the guy who was on the verge of becoming that mosque’s imam last fall.

In September, Briggs wrote a PD puff piece a about the imminent arrival of Ahmed Alzaree as new imam for the Islamic Center of Cleveland. In that report, Briggs did nothing with a red-flag statement by Alzaree that he “would not confirm his hiring, at one point saying he would not come to Cleveland because a reporter was inquiring about his background.” Keep in mind that the Center’s previous imam, Fawaz Damra, as Briggs again noted Saturday, “was convicted of falsifying his citizenship application by failing to disclose ties to extremist groups. He was deported to the Middle East in January 2007 after more than a year in jail.” Prior to that, Briggs noted in his September story, Fawaz had been exposed for “railing against Jews and raising money for Palestinian militant groups such as Islamic Jihad.” Plain Dealer reporters filed over 45 stories on Damra during all of this.

After Briggs’s September story on Alzaree, yours truly did extensive follow-up work, poring through years of records of Alzaree’s activities.

Well, not exactly. Actually, I took a few seconds and Googled “imam ahmed alzaree” (not in quotes), and quickly found a link to a sermon Alzaree gave in 2003 at the Omaha mosque where he had previously served. That sermon, since taken down from the Omaha mosque’s web site but saved here for posterity, included this near its conclusion:

Dear brothers and sisters, the talk about the Day of Judgment is long and full of things that will confuse the human mind and put fear in the hearts of the faithful. Every day that comes is much more Worse than the day before it as we get closer to the hour. Among the signs of the approach of Day of Judgment is what the messenger of Allah PBUH said: “The hour of judgment shall not happen until the Muslims fight the Jews. The Muslims shall kill the Jews to the point that the Jew shall hide behind a big rock or a tree and the rock or tree shall call on the Muslim saying: hey, O Muslim there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him, except the Gharqad tree which will not say, for it is the tree of Jews.”

Patrick Poole at Central Ohioans Against Terrorism (COAT) also weighed in on Alzaree, pointing out that his also contained a lament that the Quran-based “jizya” tax that is supposed to be imposed on non-Muslims in Muslim-dominated countries wasn’t an active practice. More important, Poole noted that Alzaree had an association with an Orange County, California Muslim cleric with apparent terror ties who had recently agreed to leave the US for 10 years rather than face a US trial on terror-supporting charges.

Having been scooped by two bloggers, the PD’s Robert Smith sprung into action, following up with a comprehensive expose of Alzaree’s activities and background.

Well, not exactly. In a sympathetic piece, he noted that Alzaree was under “public scrutiny,” and that the mosque was “standing by their imam.”

It seemed reasonable at the time to believe that there would be more digging by Plain Dealer. Especially given what had happened with the previous imam, the paper, now awakened, would surely delve into Alzaree’s past at the Omaha mosque and elsewhere.

Well, not exactly. In fact, not at all.

One month later, after no follow-up on the PD’s part, COAT’s Poole posted the results of work he had done investigating Alzaree’s Omaha mosque using the Internet Wayback Machine (the mosque apparently scrubbed most of its content shortly after the Cleveland controversy began). He found posts sympathetic to Palestinian terror groups and characterizing Israelis as “the new Nazis,” as well as links to Jihad-supporting, terror-financing, and “revolutionary worker” sites. As Poole noted, “virtually all of this material began to appear around the time that Alzaree took his position with the Islamic Center of Omaha (in 2002 — Ed.), and these sources continued up until recently.” Yours truly also noted that the Islamic Center of Cleveland itself still had officials who had been outspokenly sympathetic to deposed leader Damra and to the Palestinian terror group Hamas in high positions at the mosque.

Having been scooped yet again, religious reporter Briggs then jumped at the chance to use his paper’s extensive resources to get to the bottom of all of this.

Well, not exactly. He instead wrote an extensive “This Is Your Life” piece on Alzaree, reporting that the imam had “put aside his worries and will begin work Thursday at the center in Parma.”

Three days later, Alzaree resigned from his new job even before he started it.

Briggs reported Alzaree’s claim that “allegations by bloggers that he was anti-Semitic and was associated with individuals suspected of having terrorist ties so poisoned the atmosphere in Northeast Ohio that he and his wife, Marwa, decided to look elsewhere.” The Associated Press dutifully piled on with the headline “Blog critics force imam to resign at Ohio mosque.” Yeah, that’s the ticket: Blame it on the bloggers.

The Feb. 2 piece by Briggs attempts to add to the Parma pity party, and takes a sideswipe at those who exposed Alzaree (bold is mine):

The Islamic Center of Cleveland is struggling to find a spiritual leader three months after a Nebraska imam bowed out under pressure from critics who accused him of anti-Semitism.

Leaders at the Parma mosque said there is a shortage of American-born imams who are Islamic scholars and fluent in Arabic.

“It’s very, very hard to find somebody like that,” said Ahmed Fellaque of the Council of Elders. “The ones who are good are not gettable.”

….. Last September, the mosque hired Imam Ahmed Alzaree, an Egyptian-born cleric who led a mosque in Omaha. But the man mosque leaders thought would help rebuild interfaith relations in Northeast Ohio came under fire after bloggers posted a portion of a 4-year-old end-times sermon in which the imam quoted the Prophet Muhammad saying one sign of the approach of the Day of Judgment is that “the Muslims will kill the Jews.”

Alzaree never substantively refuted the charges. The fact that decided not to stay on the flimsy excuse that bloggers who live hours away from Cleveland had ruined it for him would seem to indicate that he couldn’t.

Continuing:

….. the mosque, having “been burnt so many times,” wants an Islamic scholar who is fluent in the English language and culture, preferably born in the United States, can relate to younger generations and the larger community and can pass a strong background check.

Excuse me for thinking that the “background check” — i.e., finding a cleric who will survive “public scrutiny” — remains the biggest stumbling block.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

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Previous Posts:

• Sept. 25 — Meet the New Imam, Same as the Old Imam?
• Sept. 29 — Ahmed Alzaree Follow-up: Who WAS That Cleveland.com Blogger? (at the Plain Dealer’s Wide Open blog)
• Oct. 2 — COAT’s Imam Ahmed Alzaree Follow-up
• Oct. 25 — Imam Ahmed Alzaree and the Islamic Center of Cleveland Follow-up: Part 1
• Oct. 25 — Imam Ahmed Alzaree and the Islamic Center of Cleveland Follow-up: Part 2
• Oct. 29 — Imam Ahmed Alzaree Resigns from Islamic Center of Cleveland (Update: AP Headline Hits Rock Bottom)

Here’s one of ‘em, from the aptly screen-names “dgreatone”, at the now-dormant Wide Open blog on September 26 (misspelling corrected):

Of course, the SCHIP is one of many attempts to nibble around the edges and gradually move the nation from private health care to government healthcare. After all, how many government programs are doing it “for the children”?

Jeff Coryell, one of the four Wide Open bloggers, begged to differ in a subsequent comment:

However, I obviously disagree that SCHIP is bad or that it is a step toward “socialized medicine.” It’s about covering kids who don’t have insurance coverage now, not supplanting private insurance.

Not quite, Jeff.

Former Iowa Governor and early presidential race dropout Tom Vilsack, one of Hillary Clinton’s earlier endorsers, let the cat out of the bag, as Michelle Malkin notes (audio is at link):

Transcript:

“I think there is going to be a commitment to universal coverage. I don’t think it’s necessarily going to be a sector by sector process. I think you either need to go in whole hog or not. We tried to sort of squeeze the middle here with doing children and doing seniors, and trying to squeeze it. If anything happens, it would more likely look something like this: you would extend eligibility for children from 200% of poverty to 300% of poverty, and create resources to insure the parents of those children.”

I must ask Jeff and others who argued similarly: Did you know this, or were you fooled? If the former, why were you pretending? If the latter, how does it feel to be duped?

Being a silver-lining person, I’m focusing on the fact that the demise of the PD-WO experiment has freed up blog time to look at things that regretfully fell by the wayside during October, and even moreso during the past week.

But for now, please indulge one last roundup and thought dump.

For starters, it bears noting that Dave and I were aware by mid-to-late morning Wednesday that Jill would resign. She asked us not to disclose her departure until she posted, so there was no point in posting anything until she did. Jill’s post went up in the late afternoon, and ours (here and here) came within a few hours of that. Interpreting our radio silence during this time as a lack of support for either Jeff or Jill, or as indicating some hope for revival for the project, would be incorrect. Neither Dave or I had any belief, barring divine intervention, that it could go on.

Before I read PD Reader Representative Ted Diadiun’s Sunday column, I believed that salvage efforts might have had potential if the four of us had huddled before Jeff’s post-termination post. I still think we should have convened as a group first (and Jeff in essence agrees with that), but Diadiun made it clear that continuation was out of the question when, after appearing to equate the blogosphere as a whole with “primordial ooze,” he concluded that:

Here’s the reality:

You can’t contribute to a political candidate and then write about his or her campaign, either as an employee or as a paid free-lancer for The Plain Dealer, on paper or online. Period.

Steve LaTourette has got nothing to do with that, now or ever.

This is one of those times when you wish you had done some thinking for other people who should have known better.

Ted, your company should have known that the Wide Open bloggers had made political contributions in the past, and should have asked us if we intended to do so prospectively (and about our activism intentions in general), before Wide Open launched. I know y’all seem to have acquired a reluctance to investigate imams, but you surely haven’t been averse to investigating bloggers in the past. The contributions and advocacy issues came up very early on, and should have been resolved early on. Stupid us — we thought that they had been resolved, or had faded into unimportance.

And I have one other name to add to the inconsistency list: Connie Schultz (aka Mrs. Sherrod Brown). If the PD gave a rip about independence in appearance it would not have allowed her to continue at the paper after Brown declared his Senate candidacy. I think her continued presence as a journalist at the paper after she married Brown while he was still a Cleveland-area congressman was out of bounds. Get married, be compelled to get a different job. It’s not like that never needs to happen — or is that only a standard when the politician involved is a Republican?

Bill Sloat, whose earlier reported contentions that Congressman Steve LaTourette was not pressuring for a Jeff Coryell ouster from PD-WO Mr. Diadiun appears to at least partially refute, made an excellent point that Newspaper Guild dues/contributions from real reporters largely go to Democrats. Two obvious questions: 1) Why are they allowed? 2) How can any dues-paying reporter covering issues like the Supreme Court’s Beck decision and its implementation claim with a straight face to be objective?

Jill has thoughts on the Diadiun column here; Dave follows up here. Jill has even more at her place (just scroll).

Jeff is still breaking through the resigned/fired thing. In a different realm, I’ve been there, done that.

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UPDATE: Meant to say this — Whether or not bloggers associated with a newspaper are paid is really a dumb question, and resolves nothing. A for-profit enterprise should expect to have to pay for professional services that it values. Further, the fact that bloggers aren’t being paid doesn’t “solve” the conflict of interest problem. Just wait until an unpaid blogger in a similar situation is found to have made contributions to a political candidate without disclosing them. It will happen, and you will find that attempting dissociation through non-payment doesn’t fly. In fact, it’s likely to attract the kind of dissembling opportunists the paper thinks it is avoiding exposure to.

UPDATE 2, Nov. 7: The Cleveland Free Times’s coverage of the story points to another potential PD conflict yours truly mentioned in a different discussion in early September (last sentence at link) –

And though it has nothing to do with blogging, it’s worth pointing out that Plain Dealer publisher Terrance Eggar joined the board of the Cleveland Clinic while the paper was running extensive coverage of the Medical Mart proposal, a pet Cleveland Clinic project. Is that less indicative of bias than a $100 campaign contribution from a blogger?

Good point, though in my view the PD is on solid ground if it has consistently and prominently disclosed the relationship.

John Fund gets to the bottom line on driver’s licenses for illegal immigrants in New York — “This Will Make Voter Fraud Easier.” Of course it will. That’s why Eliot Sptizer, Hillary Clinton, and the Democratic Party want it so bad.

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Jerry Bowyer contrasts the handling of the disasters in New Orleans and San Diego.

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Exempting military pensions from Ohio state income tax would be a positive move for Ohio’s economy:

“For those who say the state cannot afford to give up this tax, I would remind them that the military is a young person’s organization,” said retired Air Force Col. Dan Bigelow, chairman of the Dayton Chamber Military Affairs Committee.

“Many retire after 20 years,” he said. “Most are forced to retire after reaching 30. Many in their 40s have not had the stability or resources to invest in a home and so must seek other jobs to maintain or improve their lifestyles. Thus Ohio gains additional compensation and tax revenue from the second career of the retiree, the spouse’s job, and investment interest.”

Military members who leave have often been all over the world, and are much more likely than the average job-changer to settle where the opportunity is best and the taxes are lowest. That would include any one of several states with no income tax. Exempting their pensions from state taxation should be seen as a skilled worker recruitment tool.

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Wesley Smith (HT Life News) recounts a remarkable recovery that goes a long way towards proving that those who didn’t want Terri Schiavo to involuntarily die from starvation were right:

On October 19, only months after being nearly dehydrated to death when his feeding tube was removed, Jesse Ramirez walked out of the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix on his own two legs. Ramirez is lucky to be alive.

Early last June, a mere one week after a serious auto accident left him unconscious, his wife Rebecca and doctors decided he would never recover and pulled his feeding tube. He went without food and water for five long days.

But then his mother, Theresa, represented by lawyers from the Arizona-based Alliance Defense Fund, successfully took Rebecca to court demanding a change of guardianship on the grounds that Rebecca and Jesse’s allegedly rocky marriage disqualified her for the role.

The judge ordered that Jesse be temporarily rehydrated and nourished. Then Jesse regained consciousness. Now, instead of dying by dehydration, he will receive rehabilitation and get on with his life–all because his mother rejected the reigning cultural paradigm that a life with profound cognitive dysfunction is not worth living.

Michael Schiavo was apparently unavailable for comment. Old Media was apparently unavailable for coverage.

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Why am I not surprised at this? — “In the football gospel according to (Cincinnati Bengals wide receiver) Chad Johnson, selfish is good — even if it rubs teammates the wrong way.” As one recently rubbed, I can attest that it’s no fun watching a teammate (inadvertently or not) sabotage a team’s efforts.

Much more important — Just as critics who think Johnson should shut up and play can justifiably claim vindication in the Bengals’ 2-5 record, management at the Cleveland Plain Dealer, thanks to this and this (with, “oddly enough,” no mention of this), surely feel more justified in their decision to terminate Jeff Coryell today than when they did the deed on Tuesday.

Along with that, Old Media types in general attempting to adapt to the brave new world (and, despite the frequent snark here, at least a few will surely make the necessary decisions and adjustments) are less likely to see the road to success running through serious dealings with the existing blogosphere.

Original post is at Wide Open.

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I’m delegating most of my thoughts on what has to be seen, barring divine intervention, as the end of this particular “Wide Open” experiment, but not the end of wide-open experimentation, to Jill, who said it all (WLST link) pretty darn well.

If you want my perspective on yesterday’s and last evening’s events, go here.

If you want to see, or care about, the standards I’ve imposed on myself to ensure credibly perceived blogging, go here. I don’t expect others to reach the same conclusions I have about abstaining from political contributions, but I really do think that we’re going to have to wrestle with what disclosures readers routinely have a right to expect from those who choose to make them, whether it’s on proprietary or co-op blogs. I also find it odd that several of those who are seemingly obsessed with having conflict-free, fully-disclosed politicians, and who seem to concentrate their fire on those who aren’t from their party, don’t seem to have a problem with keeping their own potential conflicts of interest from their readers.

This post isn’t as much a resignation as it is an observation that the whole thing has sort of blown up, and it looks like there’s nothing left to resign from.

As with Jill, I have nothing but nice things to say about Jean Dubail and Chris Jindra, and thanks to all who visited Wide Open, moreso to those who commented there.

I do believe that somebody’s going to make this type of thing work (don’t ask me to define “this type of thing”). A Buffoon of the Month congressman, a newspaper that didn’t anticipate the potential pitfalls, and a bit of impetuousness have prevented that from happening at WO.

Looking forward, we’re still at our homes (me, Jill, Jeff, and Dave).

And there’s a Carnival of Ohio Politics to catch up on.

It’s interesting how this is turning out, because it’s running against the “accepted” stereotype. That would be the one about how conservatives are rugged “on your own” individualists and liberals are team players.

The three of us (Jill, Dave, and I) learned of Jeff Coryell’s involuntary termination in an e-mail from the PD Online’s Jean Dubail yesterday at about 4:40. I’m not the best mind reader (doh-obvious at this point), but what I thought I saw was evidence of a strong disagreement, not clear antagonism. Sure, this was only one side of the story, but I saw nothing to indicate that Jeff was in anything but an “agree to disagree” mode.

I had to leave at 5:00, fully intending to send Jeff an I’ll-miss-your-work, good-luck e-mail at about 9:30 when I returned.

Obviously, all hell broke loose in the interim.

It took a while after digesting (and feeling) the outrage to get to what I think the real questions should be, which is why I tend not to do knee-jerk posts.

Why didn’t Jeff tell us what he planned to do first? Or (better) even ask us if he should do it? Or if there wasn’t something we could do to renegotiate the ground rules? Or to collectively quit if we came to the conclusion that the situation couldn’t be solved? If he didn’t trust the two righties, why not at least run these questions by Jill? (since his Ohio Daily Blog post went up less than an hour after the Dubail e-mail, I’m assuming he didn’t contact her — if I’m wrong, Jill will surely set me straight :–>)

People demanding that “we” resign in solidarity are asking us to react in support of a person, who I thought was part of a team, who instead decided to start throwing verbal bombs not just at the decision to terminate him, but at Wide Open’s entire operation and concept.

Jeff should know that this is (with each passing hour, looking more like “was”) about bigger things. It’s about whether a traditional news operation can co-exist with the blogosphere. (Semi-related — Interestingly, though I was clearly getting under the newsroom’s skin with the Imam Alzaree story, not once was I ever cautioned to lighten up.) It’s about whether two righties and lefties can co-exist on the same blog at a relatively civil level of discourse, even in the presence of less-than-civil commenters. I can tell you that these past six-plus weeks have been tense, often very intense, but that the four of us were making progress towards informal “ground rules” and boundaries that we were getting more comfortable with. Everybody was bending and accommodating to an extent. I don’t think it was happening as fast as any of the four of would have liked, but it was happening.

Ultimately, this is about the evolution of the news gathering, reporting and analysis process. We were part of that; now it seems likely that we won’t be. Don’t get me wrong — the PD gets a large share of the blame for why we are where we are, especially its clumsy handling of Buffoon of the Month Congressman LaTourette, but I have a hard time believing that something couldn’t have been worked out.

It’s more than a little likely that all of us would have backed Jeff totally in light of his treatment, had we heard his side before the rest of the world. But we’ll never know; he never gave us the chance. I for one don’t appreciate that, and I believe I have every right not to appreciate that.

I also don’t appreciate the idea that Jeff either didn’t understand what the ultimate outcome of his in-effect call-to-arms would be (doubtful), or that he appeared not to care about the possibility that three people he called “friends” might involuntarily lose their gigs too. You’re not an island, pal.

Now anyone considering an MSM-blog coop effort has to know that any one member can, and that some will, ruin it for the rest of his or her team when things get too difficult. Again, the PD owns a lot of the blame, probably even the majority of it, but this is not a good precedent.

I do wish Jeff all the best in his future endeavors, and have e-mailed him to that effect.

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UPDATE: Here’s one the leftosphere will probably consider a whitewash, the rightosphere might take as vindication, and objectivesphere should sit up and notice. Ex-PDer Bill Sloat of the Daily Bellwether, who would be expected to have sources out the wazoo on this, has given them some exercise –

Although the congressman has widely been portrayed as the heavy, sources The Daily Bellwether spoke to all agreed that LaTourette did not ask for a firing, played no role in the sacking of Coryell, did not express anger, nor put pressure on the newspaper or threaten it in any way. The sources do agree that LaTourette spoke to The Plain Dealer’s editorial page editor, Brent Larkin, briefly earlier this month about Coryell’s work appearing on the newspaper’s Web site. Coryell’s name reportedly came up when Federal Election Commission campaign finance records were made public, and LaTourette mentioned to Larkin that Coryell had given money to the congressman’s Democratic opponent, former Ohio Court of Appeals Judge William O’Neill. LaTourette is supposed to have said something like “what’s up with that” during a brief chat, but did not suggest or demand that Coryell be fired, the sources say.

Jeff’s original contention:

I was fired because LaTourette complained. It would not have happened if LaTourette did not exert pressure.

Jeff’s reax to Sloat’s post:

I do not believe it for a minute. I was on the ultimate receiving end of the pressure and heard much about it in the weeks before my firing.

My take — Both Jeff’s and LaTourette’s contentions can exist in the same universe:

• LaTourette “complains”/”mentions.”
• Larkin gets his undies in a bunch at perceived displeasure.
• Inside a lumbering bureaucracy, “displeasure” turns into “pressure” (hey, they almost rhyme).
• Eventually, the paper decides to be “super-safe,” and lets Coryell go.
• More like super-dumb. It walks, talks and looks like pressure to Jeff, because by that time it is, while LaTourette wonders what the big deal was.

This is why congresspersons have to watch their every word and gesture. LaTourette’s buffoonery in the episode is fully intact.

From the Plain Dealer’s blog, by David Briggs:

New Cleveland imam quits before he starts

Imam Ahmed Alzaree announced Monday, three days before he was to start work as the spiritual leader of the Islamic Center of Cleveland, that he was resigning.

Alzaree said allegations by bloggers that he was anti-Semitic and was associated with individuals suspected of having terrorist ties so poisoned the atmosphere in Northeast Ohio that he and his wife, Marwa, decided to look elsewhere.

“Cleveland now is a nightmare for her,” Alzaree said. “It will never be a good start for me and the Jewish community.

The mosque has accepted Alzaree’s resignation, Zahid Siddiqi, general secretary of the mosque’s executive committee, said Monday afternoon.

“We certainly don’t want to impose on him and his family,” Siddiqi said.

Alzaree is the former spiritual leader of the Islamic Center of Omaha.

Well, well.

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UPDATES (exclusively at BizzyBlog):

Update 1: Don’t miss Patrick Poole’s post-departum on Alzaree. And this should have been said hours ago — intense appreciation is owed to Patrick for his lion’s share of the research.

Update 2: Briggs posted a much longer piece just after 5PM, apparently for the Metro section.

Update 2A: Here are the final five paragraphs from Briggs’s update:

As of Thursday afternoon, Alzaree had been planning to come to Cleveland, vowing to make an extra effort to reach out to Jewish and Christian leaders.

But as Web sites such as Central Ohioans Against Terrorism and Jihad Watch continued to probe, using such terms as “two-faced jihadist,” Alzaree said he and his wife concluded they could never have a good beginning in Northeast Ohio.

“I leave the field” to the bloggers, he said Monday. “I have peace now.”

Alzaree said he will decide among a half-dozen other job offers.

The Parma mosque will resume its search for an imam, said Zuhair Hasan, the new mosque president.

Apparently curiosity is still in short supply at the Plain Dealer. You would think inquiring minds would want to know what happened to extensively-quoted and now-former mosque president Dr. Jalal Abu-Shaweesh in the past few days. Abu-Shaweesh took over the mosque’s presidency in late 2005, and was interviewed in the December edition of the Cleveland Muslim (go to page 3 at the link). 22-23 months doesn’t seem like a normal presidential term (/understatement).

Update 3: Others taking note — LGF, RAB, WOIO, The C-Square.

Update 4, Oct. 30: Still others — Right Wing Rebel, Eye on the World (”A good Muslim can’t even call for the death of the Jews? Oh, the humanity!”), zTruth (”What would he have been teaching? I think you know the answer.”), Jawa Report, Interested-Participant, The Path.

Update 5, Oct. 30, 1PM (this item is also noted at Wide Open and NewsBusters): Oh for cryin’ out loud, the Associated Press has found a way to simultaneously hit rock bottom and continue digging — “Blog critics force imam to resign at Ohio mosque.” And it’s all over the place — Ohio.com, MSNBC, JPost, IHT, with surely others to come.

Two words for AP: As if.

Update 6, Nov. 1: The UK Times Online’s Faith Central has a short post.

Update 7, Nov. 20: Andrew Bostom of the New English Review, and whose articles on Islam and jihad have appeared in Frontpage Magazine and The American Thinker, has this to say about Damra, Alzaree, and the Hadith:

And just this past October 30, 2007 it was announced that Imam Ahmed Alzaree—the first permanent successor to Damra—resigned as the new “spiritual leader” of the Islamic Center of Cleveland three days prior to officially beginning the job. Alzaree, who at one stage of the vetting process expressed the unusual reservation that “he would not come to Cleveland because a reporter was inquiring about his background,” ostensibly accepted the position as noted on October 26, 2007, then pre-emptively resigned a few days later, after the contents of “khutbahs ” (sermons) he had delivered on March 7, 2003, were revealed.

Alzaree’s March, 2003 sermons are in fact far worse than has been portrayed by the Cleveland media. One assumes that either they have not been read at all, or at best only perused, and those reading these sermons, by and large, have no idea about the virulently Antisemitic motifs in the Koran and hadith (i.e., the words, deeds, and even physical gestures of Muhammad as recorded by pious Muslim transmitters). Moreover, these sermons were also virulently Christianophobic, invoking combined anti-Christian/Jew-hating motifs from the Koran (for example, Koran 4:157-159), as well as anti-Christian eschatology (linked explicitly to Jew-hating eschatology) from the hadith, particularly with regard to “Jesus,” or to be precise, the Muslim simulacrum of Jesus, “Isa,” as characterized in Islam’s foundational texts. Alzaree simply recounts Islamic doctrine (as per the Koran and hadith) regarding “Isa”—the Muslim Jesus—which emphasizes the Jews overall perfidy, especially their gloating (but unknowingly “false”) claim to have killed Isa.According to this sacralized Islamic narrative, Isa is merely a Muslim prophet whose ultimate “job description” includes the destruction of Christianity. Thus Alzaree’s sermon invokes the canonical hadith that this Muslim Jesus—who was never crucified—the perfidious Jews prodding the Roman’s to kill Isa’s “body double”—will return as a full-throated Muslim to break the cross, kill the pig, and end the payment of the deliberately humiliating Koranic (9:29) poll-tax demanded of Christians (i.e., the jizya). This hadith states, “He [Isa] will fight the people for the cause of Islam. He will break the cross, kill swine, and abolish jizya”—because Christians will be converted to Islam (and thus exempt from the jizya), or eliminated—“Allah will perish all religions except Islam.” Alzaree concluded the second sermon with an apocalyptic canonical hadith—repeated in the 1988 Hamas Charter (in article 7)—stating if a Jew seeks refuge under a tree or a stone, these objects will be able to speak to tell a Muslim: “There is a Jew behind me; come and kill him!

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Previous Posts:

• Sept. 25 — Meet the New Imam, Same as the Old Imam?
• Sept. 29 — Ahmed Alzaree Follow-up: Who WAS That Cleveland.com Blogger? (at the Plain Dealer’s Wide Open blog)
• Oct. 2 — COAT’s Imam Ahmed Alzaree Follow-up
• Oct. 25 — Imam Ahmed Alzaree and the Islamic Center of Cleveland Follow-up: Part 1
• Oct. 25 — Imam Ahmed Alzaree and the Islamic Center of Cleveland Follow-up: Part 2

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org and Wide Open.

This quote’s a few days old but worth repeating — from Megan McArdle, on education (HT Instapundit):

MEGAN MCARDLE on education: “Every time I see some middle class parent prattling about vouchers ‘destroying’ the public schools by ‘cherry picking’ the best students, when they’ve made damn sure that their own precious little cherries have been plucked out of the failing school systems, I seethe with barely controllable inward rage. It is the vilest hypocrisy on display in American politics today.

If not the vilest, darn close.

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Dick Morris outlines “What She’d Do: Hillary’s Hidden Agenda.” If anyone outside of Mrs. Clinton’s inner circle would know, he would.

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This will drive Jim Dobson crazy:

Former Republican presidential candidate Sam Brownback emerged from a meeting with pro-abortion GOP hopeful Rudy Giuliani and said Friday he is more comfortable with the former mayor. The former New York leader invited Brownback, a key pro-life lawmaker in Congress, to talk with him about abortion.

Brownback made it clear he did not endorse Giuliani — he hasn’t endorsed any presidential candidate yet — but he said he is “much more comfortable” with Rudy Giuliani’s position on abortion.

George Will has related relevant observations on the issue in general.

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Former House Majority Leader Dick Armey comments on the Mother of All Tax Increases (MOAT), and notes an alternative (link requires paid subscription):

Contrary to its deceptive name, Mr. Rangel’s bill is not tax relief, but a breathtaking tax increase. And it is not tax reform, but just another round of new complexity layered on top of the existing tax code, with tweaked provisions, changed definitions and redistributed income to favored groups through carefully crafted new subsections. Compliance with the 60,000-page tax code costs Americans seven billion man-hours and over $140 billion in fees to accountants and consultants, all before a single check is cut to the government. While the AMT may be repealed by this bill, the inefficiencies and burdens that keep Washington lobbyists employed full time remain.

To be clear, the $140 billion is only what is paid out by taxpayers. The cost of the 7 billion hours in compliance is separate, and is roughly 48 hours for each person in the current workforce of 146 million. Think of what could be produced (i.e., added to GDP) if those 48 hours were used for a productive purpose.

The alternative looks like it would free up a lot of those hours:

Thankfully, there’s an alternative to Mr. Rangel’s redistributive approach, and it’s being offered by a group of pro-growth tax reformers in the House of Representatives. “The Taxpayer Choice Act,” is being offered by Reps. Paul Ryan (R., Wis.), Michele Bachmann (R., Minn.), Jeb Hensarling (R., Texas), and John Campbell (R., Calif.) that repeals the AMT while fundamentally reforming the tax code.

These young Republican legislative entrepreneurs offer taxpayers the choice of remaining in the current system with its itemized deductions, charts and schedules, or moving into a greatly simplified system that eliminates all deductions and loopholes while offering only two simple rates. All taxpayers would have a standard individual deduction of $12,500, and individuals earning below $100,000 would pay a flat 10% of income, while individuals earning above that would pay 25%. Calculating taxes would take less time than brewing a pot of coffee.

I’d like to include a twist to the 1040 that would have a taxpayer who clearly would owe nothing STOP at some point in the return, with a sign-off that basically says, “It should be obvious at this point that I/we don’t owe anything. Give me/us our money back. Leave me/us alone.”

Libs will go crazy over the 25% rate, of course. But here’s the fun part, from polling data a few years ago:

Poll data suggest that the wealthy are already paying more in taxes than the bulk of Americans think they should. A Zogby poll last year asked people what a fair tax rate would be for a person making $1 million per year — an income that would put someone in the top tenth of the top one percent of taxpayers. Seventeen percent of Americans said that 10 percent was the most one should pay and 29 percent said that 20 percent was the maximum.

- In other words, 46 percent of the American people think that millionaires today are already overtaxed, paying about 28 percent of their income to the federal government when 20 percent is the most they ought to pay.
- Only 21 percent of people in the survey agreed with Sen. John Kerry that tax rates should be higher than 30 percent.

Lest one think that this is an isolated result, there are other polls with similar findings. A 2001 Fox News poll asked people the highest percentage of taxes anyone should have to pay.

- Some 52 percent said 20 percent was the most anyone should pay.
- Only 9 percent of people favored rates above 30 percent.
- Another Fox News poll in 1999 found 65 percent of people saying that 20 percent should be the maximum tax rate.

Remember, this is ALL income taxes, not just the federal income tax. Polls have consistently shown the results you’ve just seen for decades.

This is why you will almost never, if ever, hear the Charlie Rangel/Hillary Clinton crowd, whom I am tentatively naming “Team Chillary” (in honor of what they will do to the economy if they get their way), actually say that they want to raise the highest federal bracket to 39% or so with their MOAT, and then to 44% or so if the tax system in place since 2003 otherwise goes back to where it was in 2000 (this is usually referred to as “repealing the Bush tax cuts,” but should be seen as a big tax increase over what we’ve been used to now for many years). Instead they speak of tiny-sounding 4% surtaxes and the like.

This final item is posted as a separate entry at Wide Open.

You really have to wonder how obsessed one person (and it IS apparently one person) has to be to cause this. It needs to be reversed immediately.

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I was getting worried about whether an Internet tax moratorium extension will get passed. It seems more likely now, but it still looks like it will go down to the wire.

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I have to wonder if the controversy over James Watson’s racial-intelligence comments would have turned out differently if he had framed it in the context of nutrition, particularly malnutrition.

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John Edwards’ campaign was upset about this vid, and wanted the folks who shot it to take it down. You’ve got to be kidding me.

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Jihad Watch has an initial reax to the Plain Dealer’s blog piece (now also an article that will apparently appear in Sunday’s Plain Dealer in print) on Ahmed Alzaree’s imminent ascension to imam at the Islamic Center of Cleveland. The PD’s piece followed the appearance of yours truly’s two-parter on Alzaree at Wide Open (here and here) by about 5 hours. Check out some of the comments.

UPDATE, Oct. 26, 10 p.m.: A Plain Dealer report by David Briggs entitled “New Cleveland imam hopes to ease Muslim-Jewish relations” went up today (Oct. 26) at 1:56 PM. I am deferring comment on it until Saturday Sunday evening sometime Monday (new info has become available that requires vetting).

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Note: I have closed comments off at this post so that all comments end up at Part 2.

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Don’t Plain Dealer Readers and the Community Deserve to Know if the Islamic Center of Cleveland’s New Imam Is the Same as the Old Imam?

On September 25 at 2:30 PM, Cleveland Plain Dealer Religion Reporter David Briggs posted a Cleveland.com blog entry (”Islamic Center hires new imam to replace deported cleric”) about the naming of Ahmed Alzaree as the new imam at the Islamic Center of Cleveland (ICC).

In that post, he noted that:

Alzaree would not confirm his hiring, at one point saying he would not come to Cleveland because a reporter was inquiring about his background.

Briggs’s September 26 print edition version of the now-archived article apparently included a bit of follow-up work which apparently enabled him to airbrush away the doubts, as he instead wrote:

Alzaree confirmed late Tuesday that he is coming to Cleveland, but declined further comment.

It appears that the confirmation of Alzaree’s decision to take the position was enough for Briggs to justify ignoring the obvious more-to-the-story clue in the first excerpt. In both pieces, Briggs puffed his way to this conclusion:

After so many years of tension surrounding the imam at the Islamic Center, mosque officials are looking forward to a fresh start.

What seems incomprehensible in all of this is that the Plain Dealer devoted roughly 45 stories since 2001 to the saga of Fawaz Damra, ICC’s previous imam. Briggs himself recounted in the Alzaree announcement article that “Damra was indicted in January 2004 on charges that he lied about ties to Palestinian extremist groups on his citizenship application,” and that “In June 2004, Damra was convicted and stripped of his citizenship. He was deported to the Middle East in January this year after more than a year in jail.”

(more…)

UPDATE, Oct. 26, 10 p.m.: A Plain Dealer report by David Briggs entitled “New Cleveland imam hopes to ease Muslim-Jewish relations” went up today (Oct. 26) at 1:56 PM. I am deferring comment on it until Saturday Sunday evening sometime Monday (new info has become available that requires vetting).

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Don’t Plain Dealer Readers and the Community Deserve to Know if the Islamic Center of Cleveland’s New Imam Is the Same as the Old Imam?

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Part 1 covered events and disclosures surrounding the announcement of the appointment, effective November 1, of Ahmed Alzaree to become the new imam at the Islamic Center of Cleveland (ICC), specifically:

• The original September 25 blog post and September 26 print edition article communicating the announcement by the Cleveland Plain Dealer’s David Briggs.
• My September 25 blog post (Wide Open, BizzyBlog, and NewsBusters), revealing a March 2003 sermon given by Alzaree while at his previous post at the Islamic Center of Omaha (ICO), and Alzaree’s association with now-deported imam Wagdi Ghoneim.
• A follow-up article by the PD’s Robert Smith which addressed some of the concerns about Alzaree, but which also left so many items unanswered that it was reasonable to expect that there would be some kind of additional follow-up by the paper in the coming days and weeks.
• My post reacting to Smith’s story.
• The lack of PD follow-up since Smith’s report.

In this post, I am reporting a number of additional items that I believe are relevant to Alzaree’s imminent ascension to his new position.

First, Patrick Poole of Central Ohioans Against Terrorism has, with the help of the Wayback archive (since ICO’s site has, in Poole’s words, “undergone a thorough scrubbing”), uncovered information about Alzaree’s tenure at ICO that should raise serious concerns (links are in Poole’s original post, except for links to screen caps, which were added by me):

Alzaree came to Omaha in mid-2002 after an apparent mosque coup in which an extremist element had taken control and began looking for an imam that more met their tastes (at one point, there were two competing “amirs” for the center). Around the time that Alzaree assumed his new position as imam, some very curious information began to appear on the Omaha center’s website.

In particular, a page dedicated to the “Palestinian issue” appeared, including links to such articles as “The New Nazis” (i.e. the Israelis), “Intifada (Uprising)”, and “The Israeli Myths about Palestine and Palestinians Exposed” (screen cap link to “Palestine”; opens in new window).

And then there is a link to “Pictures of the Holocaust” (screen cap link to “Holocaust Pictures”; opens in new window), which bears the following comment:

We always hear about the Jewish Holocaust 60 years ago. These are picture of the Arab (Muslims and Christians) Palestinian Holocaust this year by the hands of the victims of the the first Holocaust. They learned well from their Nazi masters and executioners.

Nice. A real interfaith leader.

Then on the Omaha center’s “World Links” section we see links to Hezbollah’s Al-Manar TV and the Islamic American Relief Association, a terror financing front closed by the Feds. Another section dated as recently as May 2006 entitled “Palestinian Live Reports” features information supporting the “Jenin massacre” hoax.

And then there is the section dedicated to “Hot Spots” (screen cap link to “Hot Spots”; opens in new window), where it lists Iraq, Afghanistan, and India. Notwithstanding the link at the bottom of the page, “What is Jihad“, it’s highly unlikely that they were identifying these countries as spots of “internal self-struggle”.

In fact, on this page by Alzaree (he lists his email for suggestions on additional links) he states:

Remember that in Islam, the struggle of a nation to free itself from tyranny and oppression is also considered Jihad. Unfortunately, the world now considers such movements as terrorism and the people who try to free themselves as terrorists. Islam believes that people have the right to defend themselves even from oppressors like Israel, Russia and India.

Additionally, a page on Iraq features articles taken mostly from the Revolutionary Worker (publication of the Revolutionary Communist Party USA — Ed).

Again, virtually all of this material began to appear around the time that Alzaree took his position with the Islamic Center of Omaha, and these sources continued up until recently.

Given his position as ICO’s imam, Alzaree’s involvement in what Poole has found has to be seen as presumptively heavy. At an absolute minimum, he would appear to have a lot of explaining to do.

Second, Poole also reveals that Wagdi Ghoneim visited ICO and Alzaree in 2004, not long “before Ghoneim was taken into custody by immigration officials.” The idea that Alzaree was unaware of Ghoneim’s terror links seems tenuous at best.

Third, I can report that “someone” has interviewed Ahmed Alzaree, and has revealed the results of that interview at an overview level. That “someone” is not David Briggs, Robert Smith, or anyone else at the Plain Dealer. That “someone” reports an impression that Alzaree is a cross between a moderate and a fundamentalist, who appears to be in an exploratory and rethinking mode. If you believe that to be more than a little inconclusive, you’re not alone.

Fourth, although this isn’t really new news, I believe that something relating to ICC itself needs to be fully vetted. I have done some of that, and don’t take a lot of comfort in what I have learned.

In this 2004 article, the Plain Dealer’s Robert Smith reported the unapologetic terrorist sympathies of ICC elder Haider Alawan shortly after former ICC imam Fazaw Damra was arrested:

Haider Alawan, a member of the mosque’s council of elders, claims Damra is being framed by “Zionists” for supporting a Palestinian homeland and perhaps inadvertently supporting groups wrongly labeled terrorist.

“Hey, I support the Hezbollah. I love them,” Alawan said, referring to the Lebanon-based militant group that the U.S. government considers terrorist. “We know it’s a harassment against him. For what? For his support of the Palestinians. And it’s brought by the Zionists in America.”

Alawan said he does not know who the Zionists are or where they are.

A January 15, 2007 Associated Press report about Damra’s situation quotes Alawan and indicates that he was still an elder at the mosque:

Haider Alawan, a friend of Damra’s and a member of the Parma-based Islamic Center’s council of elders, is one of many Muslims angry with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

“There’s no end to what they can do,” Alawan said. “They take you, hold you and extradite you to wherever they want. It’s un-American.”

I learned Thursday that Alawan is still an ICC elder.

Now let’s look at Page 5 of the September 2005 issue of the Cleveland Muslim. In a section about the ICC’s revised constitution, the ICC’s structure is described as follows (bold is mine):

The revised Constitution has retained the existing organization structure of the Islamic Center based on four bodies: the General Assembly, composed of all dues paying members; the Council of Elders, consisting of five permanent members; an Executive Committee, comprised of 5 elected officers and the Imam as a non-voting member; and a Board of Trustees composed of fifteen elected members.

Another Elder, Ahmed Fellague, appears to be more moderate, at least if an op-ed he wrote on September 14, 2002 for the Plain Dealer is an accurate reflection of his true beliefs (article was found in library database; link not available):

Islam is, at its core, an unwavering belief in the One Universal God, our creator. Since he has told us in the Koran that there can be “no compulsion in religion,” our respect for other religious practices is not only voluntary, it is as mandatory as dietary restrictions or prohibitions on mind-altering substances.

Respect for Judaism and Christianity must be greater still, for a Muslim must abide by the Ten Commandments, and believe in Abraham and Moses, Jesus and Mary. A Muslim must be “a blessing to his fellow man,” not just to fellow Muslims.

Ultimately, a Muslim must love God. If we all have the love of God in our hearts, there can be no problem, no conflict that defies solution.

That leaves the other three elders, about whom I know nothing, even their names. I would say it’s critical to get a handle on their mindset to see if they’re looking for Ahmed Alzaree to be an imam who will at least sanction or at worst promote jihadist-sympathizing, Holocaust-supporting statements as exhibited in Omaha, or if they expect Alzaree to be a moderate who will interact effectively with the rest of Cleveland’s religious communities. The fact that Elder positions are permanent, and likely have been in the past, has to make one wonder if the same mindset that allowed someone like Fawaz Damri to be in charge for so many years is still present.

That remains an open item. Hey, I had to leave the Plain Dealer reporters something to do. The fact that Patrick Poole and yours truly had to take it as far as we have ought to trouble PD readers who expect it to look out for the community’s interests. The PD, to say the least, has not covered itself in glory on this one.

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UPDATE: There is reason to believe that what Alzaree knows of and about Ghoneim is well beyond what he claims in the interview with “someone,” at least based on what I have seen in the overview of that interview.

UPDATE 2: To reiterate something I wrote in my original “Meet the New Imam, Same as the Old Imam” post a month ago –

Please note that none of this necessarily makes Mr. Alzaree a terrorist, or even a terrorist sympathizer. But it definitely puts him in the same place his predecessor Damra was in late 2001 in terms of “railing against Jews,” and the distance from there to terror sympathy and support isn’t all that far.

Also, I should remind readers that “railing against Jews” is a description first used by the PD’s David Briggs last month.

UPDATE 3: There may be those who wonder what in the world any of this has to do with politics. My answer is simply that the War on Terror and Muslim/larger community relations have, for better or worse, became politicized since shortly after 9/11. There has been virtually no letup since. Ohio politicians, including its governor (and, though I don’t have a link, its previous governor), seem to be bending over backwards to give organizations like the Council for American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) political and “ecumenical” cover, while ignoring those same organizations’ perceived association with terror fundraising. People who have clear terror sympathies have inexplicably risen to positions of some authority. In one case, a non-citizen somehow got onto a board involved with Homeland Security. And finally, it’s impossible to ignore, as with the Plain Dealer and Alzaree, the seeming reluctance by Ohio’s Old Media to look into these things. Their lack of coverage and near-absence of investigatory effort has an effect on the state’s political climate just as surely as an aggressive posture in these matters would.

UPDATE 4: To those who are concerned that these are posts without a purpose, and that the possible presence of jihidast sympathizers is of no real concern, I offer these reminders:

• Nuradin Abdi and Iyman Faris (”Feds Allege Ohio Mall Terror Plot Charge Man From Somalia With Targeting Shopping Center”).
• Ohio resident Faris’s admitted involvement in a plot to take down New York City’s Brooklyn Bridge.
• Three Toledo men arrested in April of this year. They allegedly conspired to wage a holy war against the United States and coalition forces in the Middle East.

It should go without saying, but apparently must be said, that a mosque’s imam can have a significant influence, positive or negative, on his congregation. If that imam is a supporter of terror himself, or if he allows his congregation’s militants to set the religious training agenda, the larger community has every reason to be concerned.

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Cross-posted at Wide Open and NewsBusters.org.

That Hugo Chavez is doing this is no surprise (video here):

Venezuela: Thousands Protest Constitutional Changes

The police dispersed protests near the National Assembly in downtown Caracas by firing tear gas into crowds of students. The protesters, who numbered in the thousands and had thrown rocks and bottles in the direction of the police, were gathered to voice opposition to President Hugo Chávez’s plan to rewrite the Constitution to allow measures including the elimination of his term limits and the suspension of due process rights in states of emergency.

That there is minimal press coverage is also no surprise.

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He didn’t use these words, but Harry Reid, in partially blaming global warming, and not arsonists, for the San Diego County, California fires, is actually blaming China (related blog post here). Reid then denies he said it — in the same press conference. Edited audio is here.

Of course, Reid is blaming something that, unless this year is different, stopped happening in 1998.

As you can see, my personally-invented term “globaloney™” fits the circumstances.

An expanded version of this item is at Wide Open.

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Michelle Malkin has a complete roundup of what appears to be the final phase of The New Republic (TNR)-phony soldier Scott Beauchamp collapse. It’s not pretty. Journalism careers should end over this.

I think when all is said and done, we’ll learn that TNR was desperate to regain its credibility with the far left. Towards that end, it thought that a twisted-soldiers story might get them back in their good grace. Markos at Daily Kos has relentlessly criticized TNR for being too moderate, even as defectors to the Right (cough, cough).

In the process of trying to get their street cred, TNR threw what little judgment that might have remained at the publication overboard.

The Beauchamp saga is also one of persistence in getting at the truth by right-side bloggers like Malkin, Ace, Confederate Yankee, and, and….. Matt Drudge (link to the text of docs leaked to him is here; Drudge took down the original link yesterday). Interesting — Drudge despises the term blogger, seems to dislikes blogging and definitely dislikes certain bloggers, yet has been playing one on the Internet for over a decade. You’re obviously still doing great work, Matt, but sometime between this watershed 1998 speech, you philosophically lost your way.

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As blogged here several weeks ago, Robert Novak told you this was coming:

Corporations would see their top tax rate cut to 30.5% from 35% under a tax plan unveiled Wednesday by House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Charles Rangel, D-N.Y., to fellow committee members.

Upper-income families, however, would pay for that repeal with a 4% surtax on incomes above $150,000 for a single earner or incomes above $200,000 for a married couple. That surtax would grow to 4.6% for incomes above $500,000.

It appears that the separate surtax doesn’t stand in the way of also repealing the the Bush tax cuts when the expire in 2010. If I’m correct (someone tell e-mail me if they think I’m wrong), the top individual rate would go from its current 35% to 39.6% under Rangel’s proposal to 44.2% starting in 2011.

Here’s a nice tongue-in-cheeker from the Institute for Policy Innovation’s latest Tax Bytes brief that actually has quite a bit of validity (bold is mine):

Why Democrats Should Be Thanking Republicans

Democratic leaders Sen. Harry Reid and Reps. Nancy Pelosi and Charlie Rangel should be thanking—THANKING—154 House Republicans.

Those Republicans—along with only two Democrats—refused to override President Bush’s veto of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) legislation. And in so doing have made House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Charlie Rangel’s job a little easier.

See, Rep. Rangel has an AMT problem. That refers to the Alternative Minimum Tax that passed Congress in 1969 to ensure that wealthy people paid “a fair share” of income tax, but that now threatens a substantial portion of the middle class.

The problem is that the AMT was never indexed for inflation, plus the Bush tax cuts lowered the taxes of the middle class, thus exposing more of them to the AMT. As a result, the affected population has exploded from a few hundred people initially to 26 million this year, all of whom will be paying more taxes unless there is an AMT fix.

Since Rangel comes from high-income New York City, his constituents are disproportionately affected.

Rangel has a proposal that he claims would rescue about 20 million people who would otherwise be hit by the AMT, saving them some $50 billion in additional taxes.

However, under the current “paygo” (pay as you go) rules, such savings have to be offset with spending cuts or “revenue enhancements” (i.e., increased taxes).

By the fact that President Bush vetoed, and House Republicans sustained it, the Democrats’ SCHIP legislation that would have increased SCHIP spending by $35 billion ($30 billion more than President Bush wanted), Republicans have, in essence, “found” more than half of the money Rangel needs.

In other words, by rejecting that additional $30 billion in SCHIP spending, Republicans have just made it much easier for Rangel to fund his AMT reform. That’s called a win-win.

And Rangel and the Democrats can say they helped low-income children and millions of middle-class families—thanks to Republicans sustaining the president’s veto.

I think the AMT should be totally eliminated, or at most remain for those with incomes over $5 million to $10 million. And Paygo, Schmaygo — to the extent that AMT repeal is a supply-side incentive, the extra taxes that would likely come in as a results of increased economic activity should be taken into account.

Cross-posted at Wide Open.

Will This Now Be One of The ABA’s “Problems” with the Death Penalty?

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Yet another death-penalty case appears to be lost, thanks to successful defendant brinksmanship (bolds are mine):

In 1992, Cincinnati homicide detectives David Feldhaus and Harry Frisby faced William Garner, a man who broke into an English Woods apartment, stole electronic equipment, then set the home on fire to cover his tracks.

Five children died in the fire.

Only a 13-year-old escaped, dropping from a second-story window as a wall of fire flared across his bedroom doorway.

….. Garner confessed, was convicted on five charges of aggravated murder and sentenced to death.

Now, 15 years later, the U.S. 6th Circuit Court of Appeals has granted Garner’s Garner’s request for further judicial consideration of his conviction.

The court determined Garner didn’t understand his Miranda rights and reversed the conviction. The 2-1 decision released last month found Garner was poorly educated and borderline mentally retarded.

The court ordered Garner be retried or released.

At issue is not only if police read defendants the Miranda warning, but whether they make sure the suspects understand them.

Police and prosecutors are puzzled how they are supposed to do that.

….. (Assistant Hamilton County Prosecutor Gerald) Krumpelbeck called Garner a “street-smart kid” who was no stranger to the criminal justice system and the Miranda process. He also noted Garner was deemed competent to go to trial and that there were no insanity issues.

“Garner understood his rights,” Krumpelbeck said.

Don’t miss the video of the reactions of the victims’ surviving family members at the link (warning: hanky alert).

Coolidge notes that Garner was Mirandized by the book.

The idea that William Garner was at all mentally handicapped is breathtakingly (pun intended) absurd. The bolded items show intelligence and flexibility skillfully applied towards an unspeakably evil purpose, along with nerves of steel and shocking ruthlessness:

Hours before the fire, Garner slipped into University Hospital, looking for an easy mark. There, he found (apartment unit residents Marshandra) Jackson and Addie Mack, who had fallen and hurt her wrist.

Garner snatched up Mack’s purse when she wasn’t looking, stealing money and her apartment keys.

He took a taxi to the English Woods apartment, telling the driver to wait while he retrieved his belongings. He carted out electronic equipment, at one point waking up one of the children.

Garner spun a tale about her mother sending him to check everyone and sent her back to bed with a glass of water.

Before leaving, Garner set three fires in the apartment.

Then, he grabbed the phone and smoke detectors and left, Krumpelbeck said.

In late September, an American Bar Association-sponsored Ohio Death Penalty Assessment Team claimed to have found serious problems in how the death penalty is administered in the state:

Ohio’s death penalty system is so flawed it should be immediately suspended while the state conducts a thorough review of its fairness and accuracy, a team of lawyers concluded in a study released Monday.

The system is full of racial and geographic imbalances, too many defendants don’t get adequate legal help and too many protections of offenders’ rights are absent from the capital punishment process, according to a 30-month review of Ohio’s death penalty system by the American Bar Association.

The review said Ohio met only four of 93 ABA recommendations to ensure a fair death penalty system. The ABA team asked Gov. Ted Strickland to halt executions to allow a review of the system.

At the time, the ABA report was also blogged on by fellow Wide Open blogger Jeff, who supports what he claims would be a “temporary suspension.”

If the Garner case now becomes an example of one the ABA team would consider somehow “tainted,” that study should be burned on the figurative embers of that English Woods apartment. It inappropriately places perfect legal procedure above the facts and circumstances of the crime. Did the ABA team even attempt to determine if there was any kind of real doubt about the defendants’ guilt in any of the cases they reviewed? Did they not care?

In capital cases, I care about the legal nuances only after I get the answer to this question: Did he or she really do it? If yes, and without a doubt, as with Garner, all the legal maneuvering and posturing in the world doesn’t change the fact that there is nothing wrong with the verdict — or with carrying out the consequences of that verdict. It may be (but not in this case) that those who didn’t “follow procedure” may deserve discipline — but that has no impact on whether or not the capital crime was committed.

The Enquirer story has a troubling, but unfortunately not surprising, sidebar:

How Judges Karen Nelson Moore, Boyce L. Martin and John M. Rogers split isn’t surprising.

An Enquirer analysis done earlier this year of six years of death penalty decisions by 6th Circuit judges showed the 14 justices consistently voted along partisan lines.

Judges appointed by Republican presidents voted to deny inmate appeals 85 percent of the time, and judges appointed by Democrats voted to grant at least some portion of those appeals 75 percent of the time.

Moore and Martin were appointed by Democratic presidents and Rogers by a Republican.

It seems pretty clear which party criminals like William Garner who want to game the system to its fullest extent should favor. All-knowing, all-seeing Judges Moore and Martin need to tell the victims’ survivors how they can be so sure that Garner suffered such an incredible brain drain in the short time between the crime and his apprehension.

Cross-posted at Wide Open.

For Newsweak staff, conservatives all look alike (HT Instapundit).

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Guess that fortune-telling gig didn’t work out too well — Look who’s at 17th position on this list (HT MarketWatch)

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How these two sentences show up in the same paragraph is beyond me:

“Based on our numbers, 95 percent of the folks didn’t know their rates would adjust up,” (East Side Organizing Project Director Mark) Seifert said. He said brokers told others, “Don’t worry. In two years you’ll have equity, and we’ll get you out of that ARM and into a fixed rate.”

Follow me closely here:

• The first sentence says that people didn’t know.
• The second, unless it’s only supposed to apply to the remaining 5% (doubtful, in context), shows that people were told that they were in an Adjustable-Rate Mortgage.

What, they thought their rate could only go down?

It would not surprise me to learn that the answer to the seeming contradiction is this: “Mr. Seifert has told his clients to tell him that they didn’t know their rates would adjust up, even though the vast majority of them know better. That way he could say ‘based on our numbers,’ and he would look like he’s telling the truth.”

Separately posted at Wide Open.

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Ford’s revival of the Taurus has flopped so far. Of course, it’s entirely a marketing failure. This couldn’t possibly have anything to do with it (/sarc).

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This letter-writer almost gets it right. Allow me to correct:

Turkey resolution borders on is treason

One definition of treason: “a crime that undermines the offender’s government.” The resolution’s timing is designed to do just that with the war effort in Iraq.

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May the Fox Business Channel do to CNBC what Fox News did to CNN — relegate the competition to also-ran status. There’s a need for a serious breath of fair-and-balanced fresh air in the horribly biased Old Media coverage of business and