Here's a letter to the editor which appeared in the San Antonio Express-News this week:

"Unfortunately, America has its neocons and the Islamic world has its bin Ladens," spews columnist Mansour O. El-Kikhia in his rant last Friday ("Support for U.S. growing thinner"). Later, he dismisses an Arab inferiority complex as nonsense, then goes to great lengths to explain why Arabs have an inferiority complex.

I'd like to attack his argument, but I can't find one. Yes, the Arab world is a sociopolitical mess. Western policies share some fault, but it's primarily because of that civilization's inability to modernize, secularize and adopt government structures based on principles of democracy and egalitarianism.

But I don't expect El-Kikhia to understand that.

Jonah Goldberg once wrote, "If I declare I have the Holy Grail in my pants, can bake 12-minute brownies in four minutes, eat kittens because vests have no sleeves and that aardvarks tend to split their infinitives, I may well be a brave dissenter from the bourgeois norms, but I'm (also) certainly a jabbering lunatic."

How applicable.

Chris Doremus, Lakehills

One of the fascinating things about the EU’s various governing bodies is the way that they manage to combine corruption and cant in roughly equal measures. Nowhere is this more true than in the relentlessly moralizing EU ‘parliament’. To take one example, the way in which many MEPs manipulate their expenses has long been an open secret. Now someone’s talking:

“A senior member of the European parliament yesterday exposed what he claimed was widespread corruption at the Strasbourg assembly by revealing that nearly 200 of his fellow Euro MPs had faked attendance at parliamentary sessions in order to pick up generous daily allowances. Hans-Peter Martin, an Austrian Social Democrat MEP, said he had seen scores of colleagues signing on for parliamentary sessions which they had missed, to claim a daily attendance allowance of €262 (£175).”

They'll get away with it, doubtless.

Here’s a review of a nasty little play now on the London stage. Read it while sitting down. Read it while calm. Read it with a gentle CD playing in the background. Read it with a soothing drink in your hand. Read it while wondering whether the anti-Americanism of certain sections of the European intelligentsia has now become pathological. That’s not a question that should take long to answer. And then notice when the reviewer writes this:

“In Beaton's view, only the West is wicked, bringing Armageddon down on its own head. The crimes of the Islamist fundamentalists are conveniently glossed over. Moral equivalence doesn't come much more poisonous than this.

“Almost equally distressing is the lameness of the jokes and the routine mocking of Blair and Bush's Christianity - we watch the pair of them singing a song called We're sending you a cluster bomb from Jesus.

“Of course, though Beaton evidently regards Christianity as fair game, he lacks the balls to satirise the far more malign fanaticism of the Muslim world. That after all would be really risky. Far safer to pander to the self-loathing of the liberal intelligentsia.”

The reviewer is right. In an open society there ought to be nothing wrong, or – and how I hate that word- “offensive” about debating, satirizing and even ridiculing the religious beliefs – or the lack of religious belief – of others. Islam, however, seems to be exempt from this exchange. Criticizing that faith is somehow defined as ‘Islamophobia, ’ a nonsense notion invented with only one purpose – to stifle the criticism of a religion that is long overdue a great deal of criticism. And soon. What a joke. What an insult.

The successes of multiculturalism, continued:

”A school yesterday banned children from wearing England soccer shirts in case they incited racial tension.

”Parents of pupils at Grange School in Stourbridge, West Midlands, were told their children could not wear anything with the England motif during a non-uniform day to mark the last day of term.

”The decision followed attacks on the school by vandals spraying graffiti offensive to white people and the school did not want to heighten tensions."

BLITZER: Well, John, I get the sense not only what Dr. Rice just said to you and other reporters at the White House, but what administration officials have been saying since the weekend, basically that Richard Clarke from their vantage point was a disgruntled former government official, angry because he didn't get a certain promotion. He's got a hot new book out now that he wants to promote. He wants to make a few bucks, and that his own personal life, they're also suggesting that there are some weird aspects in his life as well, that they don't know what made this guy come forward and make these accusations against the president. Is that the sense that you're getting, speaking to a wide range of officials?

KING: None of the senior officials I have spoken to here talked about Mr. Clarke's personal life in any way. But they offer a very mixed picture. They say that he was a very dedicated, a very smart member of the senior White House staff, that he was held over because of his expertise in the Clinton administration on terrorism issues and the Bush administration, these officials say, wanted a smooth transition. They also say, and many top Clinton administration officials support this, that Richard Clarke could be irritable. He could sometimes get angry at those who did not agree with him. That is an opinion shared in both administrations. And, in the end, of course, he did not get the No. 2 job at the Department of Homeland Security and he decided to move on.

Cosmo takes no offense whatsoever. Cosmo and I have looked at the issue several times. There was Cosmo's interview with the president of Pakistan, and my own meager efforts here , here and here.

From a reader:

Hello:

"The problem is that ... the black community simply cannot meet the demand for qualified students." Hmmm ... so, in this context (failure that can be placed at the foot of blacks) there is a black community. In other contexts (where the blame can be placed on whites or on our economic/social/political systems and institutions and blacks demand redress of that blame) we are Americans who should not be divided. Interesting.

As an American who happens to be black, I believe that we are one people, Americans, in all contexts. So, I think that ALL of our problems are the failure of ALL Americans and that ALL Americans bear a responsibility for fixing them. Now, I suppose that white conservatives cannot go into these homes where kids who happen to be black are doing so poorly in school and replace the absentee fathers and convince the mothers to stop having fatherless kids and turn off the television and rap music and put the basketballs and footballs away. Or then again maybe you can, we don't know because it isn't as if conservatives have tried ... not only have conservative charity efforts not made it a priority but conservatives tend to shun public education and social work professions, and conservative individuals are not nearly as noted for their willingness to adopt or serve as foster parents of black kids as are, say, gay individuals and couples. Still, it is mighty re vealing that inner city charter and private schools are being founded by a tiny minority of liberal rebels willing to buck the public education terrorists while wealthy conservatives and their foundations would rather give money to the Heritage Foundation and to research the backgrounds of prominent liberal politicians and activists. So, while it may be true that black kids underperform, what are conservatives doing about it? Absolutely nothing direct, on a large scale, or of consequence ... it is allowed to remain a black problem, and so long as that situation exists I don't want to hear you guys talk about how we blacks need to quit being so concerned with our racial inequities and grievances and start seeing ourselves as Americans.

Derb - The modern faith in the power of words on paper knows no bounds. Forget the Kellogg-Briand Pact. My favorite example was from NY Governor George Pataki. "It is conceivable," he said upon signing a hate-crimes bill a few years ago "that if this law had been in effect one hundred years ago, the greatest hate crime of all, the Holocaust, could have been avoided."

Ah, that's what would have stopped Hitler -- a law saying it was illegal to exterminate millions!

I know Steve already raised this point earlier this week, but I still don't understand why liberals are so angry about high gas prices. Okay, I guess I do understand, I'm just astounded. For example, Bill Clinton and Al Gore raided the Strategic Petroleum Reserve the last tine gas prices went through the roof. Now Gore is a longstanding champion of alternative fuels. The best way to get the market to pursue alternative fuels is for the current fuel in use to get more expensive. Indeed, Gore at the time was the nation's biggest champion of "lockboxes" -- well what is the SPR if not a lockbox? Since commodities are fungible, Gore could have just as easily come out in favor of raiding the Medicare trust fund to offset high gas prices.

Similarly, how many times have we heard Euro-envious liberals talk about how enlightened Europe's outrageously expensive gas prices are? But when the free market results in American gas prices rising to a third of what they are across the pond the same liberals are stunned by the regressive cruelty being done to the working man. I guess it's a classic example of how the State is sanctified in the eyes of liberals, and therefor harm inflicted by it is holy.

That was a remarkable statement they put out, Kathryn--and, I'm afraid, a foolish one. There have always been pro-lifers in the all-or-nothing camp: people who object to our trying to ban partial-birth abortions when all the other abortions are just as bad. The bishops' conference has thankfully not been among their number. Until now.

They object to the Kass council's recommendation of a time limit for embryo research. They say it's not good enough: There's no good reason to allow the destruction of a one-day-old embryo but to prohibit the destruction of a fifteen-day-old one. That limited point is, in my mind, wholly correct. But that's a reason to say that we should prohibit research past the fifteen-day mark while working toward a complete ban. It is not a reason to trash the idea of partial legislative action.

Keep in mind that what the council is proposing is not just an end to federal funding--it's making research on embryos past a certain age illegal. The president has not even called for this. Sam Brownback hasn't. The bishops themselves haven't in any significant way been trying to do this.

The bishops also object to the proposal to make it illegal to clone an embryo with the intention of implanting it in a woman's womb. They say this ban would not be enforceable--as of course it would not be, against a rogue scientist. It would, however, effectively prevent industries from arising out of certain kinds of biotechnological manipulation that the bishops themselves oppose.

In the interests of charity, let's come up with an argument for the bishops' position that they themselves do not articulate. Perhaps they are worried that the council's proposals will undercut the momentum for more sweeping alternatives that they favor. But that clearly cannot be their reason for coming out against the date-certain proposal: Nobody has a stronger alternative. Nor is there strong momentum behind a stronger and better ban on human cloning.

The whole thing strikes me as a failure of political judgment.

In the Manhattan courtroom, Casey also questioned Johnson about whether physicians warn women that a fetus is dismembered during an abortion.

``So you tell her the arms and legs are pulled off? I mean, that's what I want to know. Do you tell her?'' Casey asked.

``We tell her the baby, the fetus, is dismembered as part of the procedure, yes,'' answered Johnson, a University of Michigan professor and research scientist at the school's Center for Human Growth and Development.

Casey asked Johnson if doctors tell a woman that the abortion procedure they might use includes ``sucking the brain out of the skull.''

``I don't think we would use those terms,'' Johnson said. ``I think we would probably use a term like 'decompression of the skull' or 'reducing the contents of the skull.'''

The judge responded, ``Make it nice and palatable so that they wouldn't understand what it's all about?''

Johnson, though, said doctors merely want to be sensitive.

``We try to do it in a way that's not offensive or gruesome or overly graphic for patients,'' Johnson said.

I'm pleased that you all could be here for the first bill signing ceremony of the year 2004.

The Unborn Victims of Violence Act provides that, under federal law, any person who causes death or injury to a child in the womb shall be charged with a separate offense, in addition to any charges relating to the mother. As of today, the law of our nation will acknowledge the plain fact that crimes of violence against a pregnant woman often have two victims. And therefore, in those cases, there are two offenses to be punished. Under this law, those who direct violence toward a pregnant woman will answer for the full extent of the harm they have done, and for all the crimes they have committed.

I appreciate members of the United States Congress who have joined us today. Majority Leader Bill Frist is with us from the Senate. Thank you for coming. Majority Leader Tom DeLay of the House of Representatives -- Members from both political parties have joined us. I appreciate the members on stage here, House bill sponsor, Congresswoman Melissa Hart from Pennsylvania, is with us. Senate sponsor, Senator Mike DeWine from Ohio, is with us. And the Chairman of the Judiciary Committees, Senator Orrin Hatch and Congressman Jim Sensenbrenner, are with us, as well. Thank you all.

I appreciate those in attendance today from across the country who have worked hard to get this bill passed. I also want to thank Sharon Rocha and her husband, Ron Grantski, for joining us today.

This act of Congress addresses tragic losses such as Sharon and Ron have known. They have laid to rest their daughter, Laci, a beautiful young woman who was joyfully awaiting the arrival of a new son. They have also laid to rest that child, a boy named Conner, who was waiting to be born when his life, too, was taken. His little soul never saw light, but he was loved, and he is remembered. And his name is forever joined with that of his mom in this statute, which is also known as Laci and Conner's Law. All who knew Laci Peterson have mourned two deaths, and the law cannot look away and pretend there was just one.

Each of these families on this stage has lost a child, or a grandchild, or both. Carol and Buford Lyons, Tracy Marciniak-Seivers, Stephanie Alberts, Cynthia Warner -- I thank you all for your courage for coming today.

As these and the other families understand, any time an expectant mother is a victim of violence, two lives are in the balance, each deserving protection, and each deserving justice. If the crime is murder and the unborn child's life ends, justice demands a full accounting under the law.

Until today, the federal criminal code had been silent on the injury or death of a child in cases of violence against a pregnant woman. This omission in the law has led to clear injustices. The death of an innocent unborn child has too often been treated as a detail in one crime, but not a crime in itself. Police and prosecutors had been to crime scenes and have shared the grief of families, but have so often been unable to seek justice for the full offense. The American people, as well, have learned of these cases, and they urged action. The swift bipartisan passage of this bill through Congress this year indicates a strong consensus that the suffering of two victims can never equal only one offense.

The moral concern of humanity extends to those unborn children who are harmed or killed in crimes against their mothers. And now, the protection of federal law extends to those children, as well. With this action, we widen the circle of compassion and inclusion in our society, and we reaffirm that the United States of America is building a culture of life.

It is now my honor to sign the Unborn Victims of Violence Act of 2004.

Some months ago, the EU got into trouble when its 'racism and xenophobia' monitoring center tried to suppress findings that much of the rise in european anti-semitism is attributable to young Muslims. Now it seems like Brussels is up to its old tricks again. The Daily Telegraph has more:

"A study released by the EU's racism and xenophobia monitoring centre astounded experts by concluding that the wave of anti-Jewish persecution over the last two years stemmed from neo-Nazi or other racist groups.

"The largest group of the perpetrators of anti-Semitic activities appears to be young, disaffected white Europeans," said a summary released to the European Parliament . "A further source of anti-Semitism in some countries was young Muslims of North African or Asian extraction."

According to the Telegraph, the contents of the report tell a rather different story, however:

"The headline findings contradict the body of the report. This says most of the 193 violent attacks on synagogues, Jewish schools, kosher shops, cemeteries and rabbis in France in 2002 - up from 32 in 2001 - were "ascribed to youth from neighbourhoods sensitive to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, principally of North African descent. "The percentage attributable to the extreme Right was only nine per cent in 2002," it said. The report on Belgium said most of the fire-bomb and machine-gun attacks on Jewish targets were the result of a spillover from the Palestinian intifada. The European Jewish Congress accused the EU watchdog of twisting data from the 15 member states to suit its own ideological bias, describing the report as a catalogue of "enormous contradictions, errors and omissions."

Every time you think that the corrupt and authoritarian 'Union' has lost its ability to shock, it comes up with something else. So what's going on? The EU's bureaucracy is not, whatever people may say, riddled with anti-Semites, although there's no doubt that some of the criticism of Israel from Brussels has tipped over into an expression of that ancient hatred (some of which, interestingly, has been displaced into an anti-Americanism that has long since lost any connection with the rational). The real culprint, however, continues to be Europe's unwillingness to contemplate the nature of the challenge it now faces. It's not a challenge that's going away, but if the EU's establishment has to throw a few Jews to the wolves in order to preserve the multicultural illusion for a little bit longer, that's exactly what it will do.

"In coming days, the liberal media will be awash with spokesmen of the Muslim community voicing a predictable mixture of self-righteousness and theological platitudes about the benign nature of their religion."

Sound familiar?

And then there's this:

"An implacable scepticism among those who shape public opinion towards lame excuses for terrorism would also go some way to denying the perpetrators the moral justifications they still appear to need. Finally, instead of teaching a bland, rights-focused multiculturalism, let alone atheism, under the aegis of "religion" as irrelevantly proposed by Dr Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, our educators should think hard about their failure to inculcate our values, be they religious or secular or a combination of the two, in the minds of Britain's very own generation of terrorists."

That's well said.

"Rich,I don't know about you, but I did things when I was a kid that I would never do now, such as shooting birds, woodchucks, etc ffor no good reason down on my Grandparent's farm. Never bothered me in the least. Could never figure out why Dad, after telling me that he used to do the same thing as a kid, would say, 'Yeah, I just kinda lost my taste for hunting at some point. I don't want to hurt them for no reason.'

Well, now I understand. Last summer I had to take care of a woodchuck that had taken up residence under my parent's deck. It had 'menaced' my Mom in the back yard, since she would by virtue of where it's hole was get between him and his home. I did what I had to do, but didn't feel good about it. In fact, I felt terrible for weeks.

The same change in attitude applies to so many things. I never was much of a bully, but used to 'let things happen' that now a days I would NEVER allow to happen. Somewhere in my late teens I broke away from the herd "impress others" mentality. I think most people do. It's called growing up.Maybe there is a chemical reason for this, maybe a psychological reason. Maybe adolecent boys can't immediately deal with the sudden spike in testosterone that comes at that age.

I think that, maybe not for all of them, but certainly for some, those boys will look back on their actions that day and cringe. I bet you at least a few of them, 20 years from now, will remember that day as one of the most shameful days of their lives, the day they burned to death an already mortally wounded man and then danced in the gore.

I hope they do at least."

WASHINGTON–The Cato Institute today announced that the winner of the second biennial Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty is internationally recognized economist and property rights activist Hernando de Soto.

"Mr Lowry,

You usually have good perspective but I think your assessment of our situation following the Fallujah atrocity is off base.

While, I share the rage I am confident that our response will be effective and appropriate and largely off camera.

I suspect some of what you describe as a lack of response to the atrocity can be explained as part of the CF that happens in a warzone. Also, your correspondent is likely correct that we did not want Marines shooting these animals in front of the TV cameras present at the site.

Still, I am confident that this will be the opposite of Mogadishu. We'll systematically kill and capture the people who did this using proven intelligence methods and harsh, focused tactics. The gloves remain off, but they were already, despite the failures we've experienced recently. Before they leave, the Marines are going to kill a lot of people who richly deserve it. We should thank God for their service every day.

The 'big picture' is that completing a 'long hard slog' is part of our strategy in that it demonstrates will and commitment that will make it easier in the future. By continuing in spite of this televised atrocity, we are reversing the lesson of Mogadishu and, to a degree Clinton's 'Legacy.' Sad to say, but this savage act may be seen as a 'bookend' in the historical narrative.

Today the President’s Council on Bioethics released a report on reproductive technologies that deserves attention from all concerned about technological abuse of human life.

Most welcome is the Council’s support for banning specific activities that demean human dignity: creating human/animal hybrids; placing human embryos in the bodies of animals, or in women’s wombs for purposes other than a live birth; buying, selling or patenting human embryos.

Also welcome are recommendations for monitoring in vitro fertilization (IVF) clinics, to prevent harm to women and children. These proposals should be strengthened by Congress.

Unfortunately, two Council recommendations raise serious questions.

First, the Council favors banning the use of embryos in research beyond a certain number of days in their development. Notably, members did not agree on the number of days, or on the reason for this policy. Some believe such a ban would be better than the current situation, in which federal law does not ban privately funded embryo research at any stage. Others want to use this policy to weaken current laws on federally funded research, which respect the human embryo at every stage. The decisive fact is that human life is a continuum from the one-celled stage onward. Any cutoff point after this event is arbitrary -- providing no principled reason not to extend the time limit for destructive research, once the precedent is established. We should not start down this road, but explore ways to discourage research that attacks any human life.

Second, the Council recommends a ban on “conceiving a child” using procedures such as cloning, or the use of eggs derived from fetal tissue or embryonic stem cells. However, “conceiving a child” according to the Council means only the act of creating an embryo “with the intent to transfer it to a woman’s body to initiate a pregnancy.” A cloning ban based on what a researcher may “intend” to do with an embryo after cloning occurs is, first of all, unenforceable. More importantly, it misstates where the wrong lies in such procedures. Human cloning is wrong because it treats human life as an object of manufacture – not because a researcher, having created the embryonic human, may “intend” to allow him or her to survive. These procedures should simply be banned.

The 9/11 hearings and the testimony of Richard Clarke remind me that Republicans have been here before, though it was before my time, and they were on the other side.

For years after Pearl Harbor, the right asked (and answered its own question): Had F.D.R. dropped the ball? Charles Beard, the liberal historian turned isolationist, made it an article of faith. Thomas Dewey accused Roosevelt of unpreparedness in 1944 when Dewey was the last Republican Presidential candidate to run against him. The sober form of the Republican case was that the American military was not up to snuff in December 1941, even though the Second World War had been going on for over two years. The harsher form was that the United States had intelligence of Japan’s intentions on the eve of Pearl Harbor and hadn’t acted on it. The paranoid form was that the White House had deliberately not acted on intelligence, knowing that a successful surprise attack would bring America into the war. (The Republican case against Roosevelt, then, was both bellicose and pacific: He ought to have done more, and he wanted to do too much.)

" As the victims lay burning, a crowd of around 150 men chanted "Long live Islam" and "Allahu Akbar" ("God is Greatest") while flashing victory signs for the television cameras."

"The small towns they lived in in southern, suburban and rural England are exactly where I grew up, which sends a shudder down my spine. Evil has come to the Shire! What this amounts to, I think, is theological, ideological terrorism that requires no state sponsor as such and no actual network like al Qaeda. And this is surely the trend. It certainly looks as if Madrid was a similarly loosely-connected operation. I'm not saying it means we should ignore state sponsors, like Iran. Au contraire. But I am saying that a policy that focuses entirely on state sponsors is going to miss an important part of the problem."

He's right to be worried, and in the point he is making. It will, to say the least, be very interesting to find out more about these individuals. If they (ethnic Pakistanis, apparently) were indeed brought up in the UK in, we should assume, reasonably mainstream families, where did the hatred come from? The usual 'acceptable' causes (racism, a sense of exclusion, economic deprivation and so on) will doubtless be blamed regardless of their actual relevance to the facts, but I wonder if there's something else. Over the last twenty or thirty years, British universities, the schools and the media have relentlessly focussed on the supposed evils of western civilization. Have some people actually been paying attention?

From a reader:

Carter's nuclear training consisted of six-months classroom training and six-months of hands-on training at a prototype (i.e., operated a land-bound Navy nuclear propulsion plant under supervision). The program produces excellent operators, but they are definitely NOT nuclear physicists. I say that as a guy who holds BS & ME degrees in nuclear engineering and has worked with a lot of ex-nukes.