Considerettes

One of the fellas I noted from this past week’s Carnival of the Vanities, The SmarterCop, gets a recipri-blogroll today. (Did I just coin a word?)

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I’ve been using BlogMatrix’s RSS feed feature to offer that to folks who want to use a news aggregator to get Considerettes, but now Blogger, using a product called Atom, can create an XML feed based on Atom’s standard. While I’m not going to dump the BlogMatrix feed, the XML from Blogger will be more current, as it’s updated every time I post an entry, whereas BlogMatrix takes a page snapshot about once a day. Whatever works for you. Copy the link to either and paste it into your aggregator when it asks for a feed source.

I’ve tried using the Atom feed with an aggregator called BottomFeeder on Linux, and it doesn’t appear to read it quite properly. Some of the text is there, but not all of it. Strange. In any event, Atom has a list of Atom-enabled software that you can peruse and see what you like. (BottomFeeder’s listed, so I guess it’s supposed to work right. Hmmm.)

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The economy grew at an annual rate of 4% in the fourth quarter (following the amazing 8.2% from the previous quarter). This is, probably, bad news for Robert Kuttner who claimed back in August,

Economic growth came in at 2.4 percent for the second quarter of 2003. That was better than expected, but it needs to hit 4 percent or higher to reduce unemployment. Bush’s cheerleaders say that will happen, in well-choreographed fashion, in the election year. But will it?

As I mentioned back then, yes it will, and no “cheerleading” required. Just a good look at history.

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For all the bluster by Democrats about Kay’s assertion that Hussein, when the war began, had no WMDs, should that have kept us from taking out the dictator?

“All I can say is if you read the total body of intelligence in the last 12 to 15 years that flowed on Iraq, I quite frankly think it would be hard to come to a conclusion other than Iraq was a gathering, serious threat to the world with regard to WMD (weapons of mass destruction),” Kay said.

That is to say, no.

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For some great modern satire, read Jack Cashill’s column “Just when did John Ashcroft join the Nazi Party?” Pay special note to who voted in favor of the oft-reviled Patriot Act.

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Good heavens, Website of the Day by RightWingNews? High praise indeed. Thank you very much John Hawkins.

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Right Wing News has the latest update on quotes from folks who just knew that Saddam Hussein had WMDs and that they were a real threat to America. The list is staggering.

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I saw that! Marcland has linked to a couple of recent posts here, so the least I could do is fix his link on the blog roll. He’s moved recently, so if you have a bookmark on him, jump on over and update it.

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James Taranto’s “Best of the Web Today” today has a great synopsis of the war debate, specifically heads rolling at the BBC over their skewed coverage, misreporting of David Kay by the NY Times, and the antiwar-for-oil crowd (that is, those who were against the war because they were getting under-the-table sweetheart deals for Iraqi oil as long as Hussein was around).

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Some of my favorite posts from this week’s Carnival of the Vanities:

• “Commentariat” notes why liberals don’t really understand the idea of Bush’s faith-based initiatives. Actually it has far less to do with them being “faith-based”, and more to do with the idea that if the private sector (faith-based or otherwise) can help the poor better and more efficiently, why should we replace them with a bloated, inefficient government program?
• A thoughtful treatment of religion v. politics by homicidalmaniak.
• The SmarterCop fisks the Democratic presidential candidates as they react to David Kay’s WMD report.
• Those candidates could learn a few things at Libertyblog, where those erroneous conclusions could be corrected.
• Joe Kelley, just for the sake of argument, suggests that, in line with Nashville schools doing away with the honor roll because of self-esteem issues, we should forget about voting or playing the Super Bowl or counting a blog’s incoming links or successfully reaching Mars or paying anyone more money than somebody else. After all, in all those cases, somebody succeeds and somebody doesn’t.
• Walloworld has some very good insights into whether or not the Internet is becoming an echo chamber.

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So do they or don’t they exist?

SOFIA, Bulgaria (Reuters) - Iraqi foreign minister Hoshiyar Zebari said Thursday Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction had been carefully hidden, but he was confident they could be discovered.

“I have every belief that some of these weapons could be found as we move forward,” Zebari, an Iraqi Kurd, told a news conference in Sofia. “They have been hidden in certain areas. The system of hiding was very sophisticated.”
…
Former chief U.S. weapons hunter David Kay said Wednesday “we were almost all wrong” about the issue and it was “highly unlikely that there were large stockpiles of deployed militarized chemical and biological weapons” in Iraq.

But Zebari, on a visit to Bulgaria, said: “We as Iraqis have seen Saddam Hussein develop, manufacture and use these weapons of mass destruction against us. He hasn’t denied that.”

Zebari was apparently referring to the use of chemical weapons by Saddam’s forces against Iraqi Kurdish villages in the late 1980s.

This reiterates what I said to the E-mailer suggesting the certainty of WMDs in Iraq was “none“. Zebari may be right, and we just haven’t looked in the right places (it is a huge country). Kay may be right, and Saddam may have just been hoodwinked by his weapons guys. But there’s no doubt that WMDs had been used in the past. That alone pushed the certainty gauge much closer to Zebari.

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“Considerable Quotes” has been blogrolled by Amy Ridenour’s National Center Blog, so back atcha.

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My lengthy post regarding my E-mail exchange with a reader on global warming is part of this week’s Carnival of the Vanities, and there’s a boatload of other blogs to take a peek at while you’re there.

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Even given the problems in our intelligence gathering, as noted by David Kay, that caused the Clinton administration to overestimate the WMD issue in Iraq, it’s nice to know that there are still a lot of folks who believe we still did the right thing in Iraq.

[Thabet Karim] Jassem was among thousands of Iraqis that had been stranded on the Kuwait-Iraq border last week over visa problems. Some 33,000 Iraqis were chosen by lottery to perform the Haj this year, the first pilgrimage for post-Saddam Iraq.

“We remained nine days at the border, it was a very miserable time for thousands,” said Bakkar Rasoul, a Kurdish eye doctor from Suleimaniya. “But I am really happy that we are free and God helped us to visit Makkah.”

“I and many people are thankful towards the United States because they were able to release us and we will definitely never forget. I don’t think any Muslim can forget this,” he said, standing by Kurdish and Iraqi flags beside the Iraqi pilgrims.

You’re welcome sir. Some folks don’t understand it, but I’m glad you do.

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Justice Antonin Scalia was right:

Justice Antonin Scalia warned that the ruling [that struck down Texas’ anti-sodomy law] would unleash a wave of challenges to state laws against “bigamy, same-sex marriage, adult incest, prostitution, masturbation, adultery, fornication, bestiality, and obscenity.”

So what’s one of the results of that ruling?

Sure enough, [Brian] Barnard, a civil rights attorney, has brought a lawsuit challenging Utah’s ban on polygamy. And some legal experts say the case could have a fighting chance because of the Supreme Court’s gay-sex ruling.

The federal lawsuit, filed Jan. 12, involves a married couple, identified only as G. Lee Cook and D. Cook, and a woman, J. Bronson, who wanted to enter into a plural marriage but were denied a marriage license by Salt Lake County clerks.

Can you hear it; the sound of American society sliding further down that slippery slope? It’s almost deafening.

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