Considerettes

UN Weapons Inspections: Day 13: OK, so Iraq didn’t make mustard gas during the time we had been kicked out of there, my mistake. They only started work on nuclear bombs. That’s all. No biggie.

Correction: According to James Taranto’s “Best of the Web”, the mustard gas artillery shells found in Iraq were not contraband.

“In fact, inspectors had identified the weapons but didn’t have time to destroy them before they were kicked out of Iraq in 1998. This time the inspectors were making sure the shells were still intact, as the Iraqis were not supposed to tamper with them–a somewhat perverse result of the U.N. resolutions, since it ended up leaving Saddam with weapons of mass destruction during the period with no inspections.”

I apologize for the error and conclusion-jumping. But I’m still watching.

How much of the planet is still untouched wilderness? If you said “about half”, you’d obviously not be an environmentalist. You’d also be right.

Well, the first major winter storm has hit the US, and will probably (hopefully?) quiet the global warming debate, at least until spring. The Wall Street Journal’s OpinionJournal website has an interesting take on the global cooling going on, and how those predicting excess heat on our planet were in the recent past predicting excess cold.

UN Weapons Inspections: Day 9: Didn’t get into the double-digits, and they’ve found “a powerful chemical weapon” already (specifically mustard gas in artillery shells). However, you’ll have to do a bit of digging to find that out. In the AP article I’ve linked to, the fact that they were found isn’t mentioned until the sixth paragraph, and the headline is “Iraq: Inspectors Spying for U.S., Israel”. No thanks to the Associated Press for doing what it could to downplay this (but thanks to Jim Taranto’s “Best of the Web” feature of OpinionJournal for pointing this out).

OK then, time to send in the troops, or is the anti-war crowd going to concoct another excuse?

Rod Dreher of the National Review points out, with plenty of examples to back it all up, that liberals and their lap-dogs in the press don’t consider hate directed towards Christians as hate at all. The “hate crime” laws only work one way (which, I’m thinking more and more, was the point in the first place). ‘Straights’ kill ‘gay’…makes the national news for a year. ‘Gays’ kill ‘straight’…virtual silence. If the ‘straight’ killed was a Christian, ignore that angle. Rod’s article makes great points showing both the incredible double standard that is “hate crime legislation”, as well as demonstrating big media’s complicity in towing the liberal line.

Al Gore ripped into Fox News, the Washington Times and Rush Limbaugh for being lap-dogs for the Republicans. Well, there’s no denying that Rush certainly prefers them to Democrats, but he doesn’t present himself as a non-partisan anyway. However, consider the TV & newspaper businesses. Al’s complaints about how Fox & the Times cover Republican side of the day’s stories make no sense. If you’ve ever watched the former or read the latter, you know that both sides are represented when it comes to the hard news stories. The problem lies in virtually every other major media outlet, where the conservative side is diminished or ignored, as we saw above with the disparity in coverage of “gay v straight” crimes. Fox & the Times aren’t the problem, they’re the solution! The problem is people like Al who think that liberal-bias in the news is OK while balance is evil.

(For a daily dose of liberal bias in the news media, subscribe to the Media Research Center’s daily CyberAlert. I think that sometimes Brent Baker’s a bit over-sensitive to things, but there’s still plenty of good examples of how the press slants by how they report, what they report, or what they ignore. The best bits they do compare coverage of similar events when the target was a Democrat vs. when it’s a Republican. Very eye-opening.)

Suicide bombers tied to Al-Qaida who planned on bombing Western embassies were arrested in Singapore. We’ve been sharing intelligence with Singapore in order to thwart plans like these.

Remember this when folks like Daschle suggest that we’re doing little to nothing in the war on terror. There have been loads of stories like these, and the Democrats know that it makes Bush look better every time.

So, of course, they lie about it, and the media never challenges their statements. How convenient.

UN Weapons Inspections: Day 1: Iraq is surprising folks by wanting to grant the press more access to covering the inspections than the UN would like. This from a country that has, according to the AP article, one of the most restrictive press policies in the Middle East.

This could mean that either Iraq really doesn’t have any WMDs, or that they do and either they hope the UN will be reluctant to have it shown on live TV that their trust of Iraq since 1998 was misplaced, or Iraq believes it’s hidden their WMDs pretty darn well and can trust the UN not to balk when Iraq tells them where they aren’t allowed to inspect. There may be other reasons, but the point is that the possibility that Iraq is being completely open and honest is, given their history, highly unlikely. This gives one pause to question their motives in giving press freedoms that they never have before.

Keep watching.

Oh, I love this new slogan (or new take on an old slogan) from The Volokh Conspiracy blog:

Smokers don’t impose health care costs on society; governments that insist on paying for smokers’ health care impose health care costs on society.

It’s just brilliant. And it points out that much of the remedies liberals are trying to exact from folks like tobacco companies are the results of failed liberal policies. The result of universal health care would be the destruction of any industry not deemed worthy enough by the liberal ideologues, when in fact if they’d just let people pay for their own choices, the rest of us wouldn’t have to.

Iraqis firing on coalition forces’ jets is not the way to win friends (anti-war activists) and influence people (the UN). Wonder what UN resolutions they broke in doing that?