Author: Fuzzy Curmudgeon

From Fox News, “Israeli Tanks, Troops, Enter Nablus; Hamas Regrets U.S. Deaths”:

The violent Islamic Hamas took responsibility for the bombing, saying it was retaliation for last week’s Israeli air strike in Gaza City that killed a top Hamas commander and 14 other people, including nine children.
Hamas spokesman Abdel Aziz Rantisi said Thursday that America should “advise its citizens not to go to areas of war.”

Hamas spokesman Adbel Aziz Rantisi should advise his compatriots not to fuck with Americans.

But on Friday, he expressed regret for the deaths of the Americans. “They are American citizens who just came here to visit,” he told The Associated Press. “Our battle is against the occupation.” However, he said he was referring only to “pure” American citizens, “not those who have dual (U.S.-Israeli) citizenship.”

Oh, OK, let’s be racist and split hairs.

One of the victims was a dual citizen, Dina Carter, 37, who was buried in Jerusalem Friday.

Guess she wasn’t pure, huh, Abdel?
Wish I could send a daisycutter bouquet to make him feel better.

$13K an hour to fight Big Tobacco.
These lawyers ought to be ashamed of themselves. Moreover they should be so ashamed of themselves that they give all the money to charity and then commit suicide along with their wives, children, and any other decsendants, so as to do the world a favor.

“Lawyers are not entitled to grab as many chips off the table as they feel like,” [Manhattan Institute legal expert Walter] Olson said. “They take an oath as officers of the court, and that means sometimes leaving some of the money on the table.”
Money, some point out, that could’ve gone where the $25 billion settlement went: to the state’s Medicaid fund, which pays for health care for the poor.

From Fox:

Lashing out at the judge and the lawyers appointed to represent him, Zacarias Moussaoui said he is being set up for conviction as a Sept.11 conspirator by the very people duty-bound to protect his rights, according to court papers released Thursday.

Why is this guy even on trial? Why wasn’t he immediately handed over to the military for some serious grilling, and then left staked out in the high desert?
(Hmm…unintended bit of punnery, there…or would he bake in the desert rather than grill?)

A Google search on “congresscritters” brings up this as the #1 hit.

I am 36% Geek

You probably work in computers, or a history department at a college. You never really fit in with the “normal” crowd. But you have friends, and this is a good thing.

Take the Geek Test at fuali.com
[I have a bachelors in History, and I am a software engineer. Not only do I have friends, I happen to be happily married. Which is damn straight a good thing.]
(Link via Dawn.)

18.75 %

My weblog owns 18.75 % of me.
Does your weblog own you?

Israel’s cable companies have received permission to remove CNN from their programming. (Link via Balagan)
Why can’t we do this here? I’d much rather get the BBC than CNN.

Truly compelling article in the London Times this morning. The headline is “Bush on the skids? It’s all a load of baloney”, but the key sentence is down around the middle, in a discussion of how American government works:

The effective secret of America’s success is that Washington is habitually immobilised.

A beautiful paraphrase of Jefferson’s “That government is best which governs least”. (Which I may be paraphrasing somewhat myself, I don’t have the quote in front of me…)

OK, I’ll grant you, it sounds like the FBI/CIA/et alii are stumbling around on Homeland Security issues like a bunch of addled Keystone Kops — but there my agreement with the Professor, et alii, ends.
Case in point: The Civil War. If you were to read the history of the war (and I highly recommend Shelby Foote’s three volumes if you’ve not read Civil War history before — it’s a lot to read but it is eminently readable) and stop just before the Battle of Gettysburg (1-3 July 1863), you would be convinced that the South must have won the Civil War. The North bumbled its way through almost the entire war, including the period after Grant was given the Army of the Potomac. The difference between Grant and his predecessors was that he was willing to face what Lincoln called “the arithmetic”, which meant that he was willing to accept huge casualty lists because he knew that if he inflicted as many casualties as he took, the Army of Northern Virginia (the only serious threat to the Union that the Confederacy ever mounted) would quickly be whittled down to nothing. And in fact, even given the huge casualties the Union absorbed between the time Grant took over and the time he was in front of Petersburg and Richmond, Lee was left with almost nothing to mount a defense. At one point he had one man to every two yards of defensive line, and as time went on leading to the Nine April Days, he had fewer and fewer.
Another case in point: The Second World War. Flatly stated, this country was solidly on the defensive from 7 December 1941 until 6 June 1942 (the Battle of Midway). Many of the same mistakes were made by intelligence services and police forces before Pearl Harbor and before 9/11. The inability of intelligence services to put together random facts to create a whole; the inability of the country to control its borders; the sheer arrogance of thinking we were unassailable by the likes of the Japanese or al-Qaeda…
I don’t know. Gee. I wonder if all these Homeland Security failures are rope-a-dope?

Perhaps you bloggerati who fear the worst about the DHS and blog (quite intriguingly, but perhaps overwrought-ly) about military takeovers (via InstaPundit) and the end of blogging as we know it by 2012 or 2014 ought to read Terry Eastland’s column today over on Jewish World Review.
[UPDATE: I fixed the link to Eastland’s article to point to the permanent page at JWR.]
Some good points here. Lincoln (and Davis, too, but nobody remembers) suspended the right of habeas corpus, there were loyalty prosecutions under Wilson in WWI, and of course, we resettled the Japanese in concentration camps during WWII. Eastland’s point is that we don’t see any of that happening, and none of these restrictions seem to repeat themselves.
Eastland cites an essay by two professors at the University of Chicago Law School which discusses all of this. I won’t link the essay directly, go read Eastland and click on his link to it.