I was browsing my server logs recently when I came upon this entry:

halhoupro3.halliburton.com – – [09/Nov/2005:06:17:58 -0800] “GET /random/jenna.jpg HTTP/1.1” 200 24414 “http://images.devilfinder.com/go.php” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; Q312461; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)”

Hmm…Make of this what you will.

I found this blurb in a discussion group, so I thought I’d share my comments.

The 2000 presidential election was a good test for our democracy. The country is becoming more and more diverse. With each day more come in, thus increasing the diversity. Diversity of culture is not bad. It is the diversity of political beliefs that cause the problems. When diversity reaches all times high little to none are pleased.

When you say that the diversity of political beliefs causes problems, are you aware that it is such diversity that defines democracy? One of the cornerstones of democracy is the right to associational autonomy, i.e. the right to form interest groups. If, for instance, a nation were governed by one monopolistic political party or interest group, its political system could not be defined as a democracy. Our democratic guarantee of associational autonomy ensures the diversity of interest groups and political parties.

Perhaps the term “polarization” was the term you meant to use. Some are of the belief that our nation is politically polarized like never before, with liberals and conservatives perpetually fighting each other. Yet razor-thin popular vote margins — such as what Florida experienced in 2000 — are not necessarily the indicator of such polarization. It simply means that the two major political parties were about equally represented in the election. Correlatively, landslide victories, such as Reagan (1984), Nixon (1972), or Roosevelt (1932) do not necessarily ensure political peace and harmony. In fact, quite often the opposite is true.

I’m interested in your solution to your statement that the “diversity of political beliefs … cause the problems”. Would you prefer that everyone hold the same political beliefs? If this were so, by logical extension, there would be one political party, one presidential nominee on the ballot, et cetera.

Krauthhammer: Withdraw this nominee.

There are 1,084,504 lawyers in the United States. What distinguishes Harriet Miers from any of them, other than her connection with the president? To have selected her, when conservative jurisprudence has J. Harvie Wilkinson, Michael Luttig, Michael McConnell and at least a dozen others on a bench deeper than that of the New York Yankees, is scandalous.

Sadly, what qualifies Miers is her sex — if she were a man, Bush wouldn’t have given her a second thought. When O’Connor retired, it’s as if Bush were required to maintain a Supreme Court that is 22% female.

I know this article is a bit old, but for some reason it’s remained in my mind as the epitome of The Onion‘s peculiar brand of humor. An excerpt:

As a patriot and true American, my heart sings at the thought of the Pentagon, and the zealous, calculating measures undertaken by the proud military bureaucracy of this great superpower. I feel a surge of pride when I think about our high-tech GBU laser-guided bombs, capable of carrying a 2,000-pound warhead. I tied a ribbon around my tree for the safe return of our nation’s F-16s, because our military aircraft are instrumental to finishing our work in Iraq.

Source: I Support The Occupation Of Iraq, But I Don’t Support Our Troops

Wow. John Roberts totally cleaned Senator Kennedy’s clock this morning. Says Will Malven from Men’s News Daily:

On one side we have the soon to be new Chief Justice Roberts sitting with no notes or props and on the other side we have eighteen Senators the various staff members, and all of their accumulated paper work, notes, letters and the like. The results, no contest. For two days now Judge Roberts has taken the Senate Committee to law school.

Listening to excerpts of Roberts over the past four days has made my jaw drop on numerous occasions. Consider Kennedy’s pathetic excuse for a question, and Robert’s answer:

KENNEDY: You mentioned in your memoranda that we should — you’re familiar, I think, with these words. They’ve been written up in the journals and you can probably recognize them. “We should ignore the assertion that the EEOC is unAmerican, the truth of the matter notwithstanding.” Is there anything — is there some reason that you would make a comment like that..

ROBERTS: Well, Senator, you do have to read the memo, I think, in its entirety to put it in context. That was not my language. That was the language — the unAmerican reference was the language that was employed by an individual who had a case before the EEOC. He actually won his case before the EEOC but he didn’t like the difficulty and the time involved.

He wrote to the president. He said two things: one, that his treatment at the hands of the EEOC was unAmerican; and, two, that the president had promised in the campaign to abolish the EEOC, and he wanted to hold the president to that promise. It was my responsibility to figure out how to respond to this complaint that had been received. And how we responded was by protecting the EEOC from interference by the president in any political way, by protecting the EEOC from this sort of complaint.
. . .
And the point of the letter — when you read the whole memorandum, you see two points. The first is that I was unable to determine, in the short time I had to respond, whether or not the president had made such a pledge to abolish the EEOC. I simply didn’t know. And I said that in the paragraph, if you read it. And that’s what the truth of the matter notwithstanding is referring to: the question of whether or not the president had promised to abolish the EEOC.

I say right in the memo that we cannot determine that. And whether his treatment was unAmerican or not is beside the point; we don’t interfere with the activities of the EEOC. That was the conclusion and that’s what we did in that case.

I couldn’t have come up with a better answer had I had months to research and prepare! Totally astounding. Later, Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) asked a question which amounted to “Will you do anything to extend freedoms and correct injustices?” The slam-dunk answer from Roberts:

I had someone ask me in this process — I don’t remember who it was, but somebody asked me, you know, Are you going to be on the side of the little guy?

And you obviously want to give an immediate answer, but, as you reflect on it, if the Constitution says that the little guy should win, the little guy’s going to win in court before me. But if the Constitution says that the big guy should win, well, then the big guy’s going to win, because my obligation is to the Constitution. That’s the oath.

The oath that a judge takes is not that, “I’ll look out for particular interests, I’ll be on the side of particular interests.” The oath is to uphold the Constitution and laws of the United States. And that’s what I would do.

Be still my beating heart! The Supreme Court will be in good hands when Roberts in confirmed.

Eric Meyer recently posted an entry about his apparent unpolished skills answering interview questions:

I have to be honest: reading the full transcription of the interview was a deeply shocking and humbling experience. In the past, when reading transcripts of news interviews and commentary shows, I’ve winced and clucked over the mangled syntax of the people being transcribed. False starts, weird shifts, strange commas, unfinished sentences, mind-number repetition, long rambling assaults on syntax and coherence —what was wrong with these people? Are these the best minds our society can produce? Can none of them do so much as utter a sentence with a clear point and progression? How many “you know”s does one person really need?

Some people just have a knack for proper diction during interviews. Consider John Roberts, answering a question yesterday during his Senate Judiciary Committee hearing:

Senator, you did not accurately represent my position. The Grove City College case presented two separate questions, and it was a matter being litigated of course in the courts. The universities were arguing that they were not covered at all by the civil rights laws in question simply because their students had federal financial assistance and attended their universities. That was their first argument. The second argument was, even if they were covered, all that was covered was the admissions office and not other programs that themselves did not receive separate financial assistance. Our position, the position of the administration, and, again, that was the position I was advancing, I was not formulating policy, I was articulating and defending the administration position.

None of the dreaded “filler words”. Totally unscripted, unprepared, unrehearsed — the man is a machine. Some people take comfort in others’ inability to speak in public (Thomas Jefferson’s problems come to mind). Somehow, Roberts’ eloquent words likewise give me comfort.

Eric’s admission to poor interview-giving doesn’t make him any less of a “CSS god” in my eyes. I’d be just as bad at it if I were important enough to be interviewed.

How quickly he forgets. Muhammad Yousef Al-Mlaifi, a director at Kuwaiti’s Ministry of Endowment, believes that Hurricane Katrina was a “soldier of Allah.”

“But how strange it is that after all the tremendous American achievements for the sake of humanity, these mighty winds come and evilly rip [America’s] cities to shreds? Have the storms joined the Al-Qaeda terrorist organization?

…I began to read about these winds, and I was surprised to discover that the American websites that are translated [into Arabic] are talking about the fact that that the storm Katrina is the fifth equatorial storm to strike Florida this year… and that a large part of the U.S. is subject every year to many storms that extract [a price of] dead, and completely destroy property. I said, Allah be praised, until when will these successive catastrophes strike them?

“…I opened the Koran and began to read in Surat Al-R’ad [‘The Thunder’ chapter], and stopped at these words [of Allah]: ‘The disaster will keep striking the unbelievers for what they have done, or it will strike areas close to their territory, until the promise of Allah comes to pass, for, verily, Allah will not fail in His promise.’ [Koran 13:31].”

What Muhammad is failing to remember is last year’s Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami which killed 200,000 people — about half of which were Muslims from Indonesia. I’m willing to bet Muhammad didn’t call that disaster a “Christian soldier” or a harbinger from the United States. Muhammad is also forgetting about the chronic earthquakes in Turkey and Iran, two countries that are about 99% Muslim.

From a narrow, personal-budget perspective, I don’t give a left-handed flying farkle about crude oil prices. Reid put it best the other day about how many of us are whining about nothing:

But right now, [Katrina survivors] need our help. They need your help, and luckily, they need it from the one thing you control.

And what are a lot of us doing? Whining. Yesterday in Atlanta, we had a full-fledged gas scare, complete with price gouging. People waited up to two hours in line to pay $4-$6 per gallon for gas, yet today there are no lines, and gas is below $3.50 per gallon. So people are whining about price gouging.

Look at the reports from New Orleans and Mississippi. If the sole effect Katrina has on you is some time in line to buy pricey gas, how freakin’ lucky are you?

Gas prices don’t matter to me. Why should I worry about them? Is there anything I can do to make them go down? No.

Some say that Islam’s third pillar, Zakat, was the forbearer of the graduated tax code. Today’s tax code is even more extreme than the ideal proscribed in Zakat. Islam’s across the board tax is a flat tax, not a graduated (progressive) tax. While Zakat implores that 2.5% of one’s annual holdings be given to charity, for it to be a truly graduated code, this percentage would have to be progressively higher as the scale of wealth ascends. For example, one with modest holdings would give 2%, one with holdings over $500,000 would give 2.5%, one with holdings over $1,000,000 would give 3% and so on. A similar type of progressive tax code is one of the major facets of the Communist Manifesto, and has been a part of the US income tax code since World War I.

It’s quite sad that it’s come to the point where a proper study of Islamic culture must be prefaced with the explanation “Not all Muslims are terrorists”. But it’s obvious why the “stereotypical terrorist” is Muslim, as the great majority of terrorist acts in the past 30 or so years have been committed by fundamentalist Muslim extremists.

That the Oklahoma City bombing wasn’t committed by Muslim extremists doesn’t explain away their growing track record:

1998, the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were bombed … 2000, The USS Cole was attacked and more than 15 American Sailors were killed in Yemen … 11 Sept 2001, four airliners were hijacked and destroyed and thousands of people were killed … 2002 reporter Daniel Pearl was kidnapped and beheaded … 31 July 2002 5 Americans were killed by a Palestinian HAMAS bomber in Jerusalem while attending school … 12 Oct 2002 more than 200 innocent civilians (including 200 Australians and 5 Americans) were brutally murdered in a Bali nightclub … 29 Oct 2002 more than 700 Moscow theater goers were taken hostage and threatened with execution … 11 Mar 2004 Madrid train bombings which killed 191 people and wounded 1,460 … 1-3 Sept 2004, Beslan, Russia school children taken hostage; 344 civilians were killed, at least 172 of them children, and hundreds more wounded … 7 July 2005 London bombings, 56 people were killed in the attacks, with 700 injured …

*Note that these specific atrocities were not committed within the context of declared wars.

To put this into perspective, there are over 1,000,000,000 peace-loving Muslims in the world who are not extremists. The idea of jihad has been corrupted by extremists to the degree that it justifies the murder of innocent people (especially Jews, Christians, and Westerners) for the purpose of instilling fear and terror into peoples and governments. That some Americans react negatively to the concept of “Arab” or “Muslim” is a testament to the terrorists’ effectiveness in instilling fear and terror.

When law enforcement and government agents are assigned the task of looking for terrorists, it seems prudent to me to profile people who are most likely to be terrorists. Put another way, instead of confiscating the nail file of an elderly woman with Alzheimer’s, we should be looking for terrorists. It’s all about statistics. It would be absurd to ignore them. A distinction should be made between statistical profiling and racial profiling, the latter of which is prejudicial and not based upon common sense.