The Wolves in Sheep's Clothing

It seems that, sensing yet another opportunity to get his name in the paper, Jesse Jackson has taken up the cause of environmentalism. After a green jobs rally Jackson attended, his bicycle electric hybrid Cadillac Escalade SUV was stolen.

If you're asking, "What business does a gas-guzzling SUV have at a green jobs rally?" then you aren't very familiar with the environmental movement. It is standard procedure for the speakers at such rallies to travel via private jet and be whisked to the site in SUV's, which run with the AC on full while they speak lest they not have to sweat on the way back to their 4500-square feet hotel suite.

Do we really need to point out the contradiction of advocating for green jobs and against "dirty fuels" while traveling in a vehicle that averages 14 miles to every gallon of gasoline? Convincing people that saving the environment requires some sacrifices such as higher cost for fuel begins at difficult; doing so while not just avoiding sacrifices, but squeezing the very resources one wants conserved can only be read as hypocrisy.

Hypocrisy? Please. The author gives them far too much credit. It is worse than hypocrisy.

It is feudalism, a caste system - one in which the self-appointed lords and ladies who have arrogated for themselves the task of deciding what is best for all us peasants by virtue of their superior intellect (don't believe it, just ask them) are to be feted and revered and pampered with all of the finest food and drink and accommodations and entertainment the world has to offer, whilst lecturing the rest of us on the sacrifices we will be required to make and the impositions on our freedom we will be forced to endure and the reductions in our life spans and lifestyles that will be necessary in order to create a world as they wish it to be.

It is condescension camouflaged as concern, gluttony disguised as austerity, selfishness masquerading as altruism.

Righthaven Suits: Who Could Be Next?

With word that Righthaven has filed suit against the Angle campaign, the question arises what other political campaigns may be targets. Campaigns are famous/infamous for capturing media articles about their candidates and posting them on their own sites - sometimes in whole, sometimes excerpting parts, nearly always with attribution but often without a link to the original.

Shelley Berkley's re-election campaign has posted, in its entirety and without a link to the original, an endorsement she received from Las Vegas CityLife, a Stephens Media, LLC publication. The relevant page on the Berkley campaign's website is here. CityLife's endorsement on their website is here.

I have emailed the Berkley campaign asking if they obtained permission from CityLife, Stephens Media or Righthaven to publish this endorsement or if they have received notice that they are in violation of copyright for reprinting it. I will report any response I receive.

I am not a Berkley supporter, although I have to admit that she delighted my then-infant daughter when she was at a nearby table at Macaroni Grill a few years ago. But the reason I mention this is not to put a target on her campaign but to point 0ut the potential absurdity of these types of lawsuits.

As reported earlier, Righthaven has sued the Angle campaign for, twice, reproducing in their entirety an article from a Stephens Media publication. In this instance the Berkley campaign has done precisely the same thing. Therefore, one would think the same standard should apply.

But here is the absurdity. A campaign could receive an endorsement from a publication and then be sued by that same publication for printing the endorsement on its website.

RIP, Joy

When we arrived home last night we discovered that my daughter's goldfish had died. RIP, Joy.

The Best Idea I've Heard In a Long Time

The next of my CFL bulbs that burns out (don't believe that 2-3 years stuff, I've had some last just a few months) I'm mailing to either Harry Reid or Dina Titus. Properly and safely wrapped and labeled, of course.

Watch Out, Political Campaigns

Looks like we have the answer to my question about whether political campaigns are immune from copyright infringement suits? The Angle campaign is now a target.

The Las Vegas Review-Journal’s copyright infringement lawsuit partner on Friday sued U.S. Senate candidate Sharron Angle over R-J material posted on her website, allegedly without authorization.

The suit, filed in U.S. District Court in Las Vegas by Righthaven LLC, seeks damages of $150,000 against Angle personally and forfeiture of her website domain name sharronangle.com.

The Democratic Party of Nevada, which has also been sued by Righthaven, charged in an Aug. 23 press release that the Review-Journal had a double standard to “hold Angle harmless while suing the Democratic Party and progressive organizations.”

We shall see if Righthaven also goes after the Titus and Reid campaigns as well, which, as noted on a previous post on this site, also contain "news" items that are merely cut-and-paste excerpts from the R-J. However, the two Democratic campaign websites do not post entire articles, as Angle's website does, merely the opening couple of paragraphs.

Idealism Crashes Head-on With Reality

As usual.

The 1999 Ottawa Convention was supposed to have reduced land mine casualties among civilians. It hasn't worked

What do you mean it hasn't worked?! We've all been taught that once we sign a treaty or pass a law the problem will disappear.

because the largest manufacturers of land mines, Russia and China, refused to sign.

Color me surprised - rogue regimes refusing to sign (or adhere to) a treaty that might limit their ability to cause havoc. Whoda thunk it? But that's not the only reason.

In Colombia, the rebels find it cheaper to build their own landmines. Labor is cheap, as are the components. Thus land mines, competitive with the factory built ones from China, can be built for less than three dollars each. You can find all the technical data you need on the Internet.

Obviously, the next step must be to regulate the Internet.

A Better Product for a Lower Price? Can't Have That!

One of the stark contrasts between the gubernatorial candidates is their stance on school vouchers. Republican Brian Sandoval favors allowing money to follow the student whatever school his parents prefer to send him, while Democrat Rory Reid rejects the idea of the state expending any money to educate students in private schools.

KLAS-TV Channel 8 recently had a story on school vouchers and highlighted a particular private school - Lamb of God Lutheran School. One aspect of the story to me is particularly striking.

Tuition at Lamb of God Elementary School is $6,300 a year. A $6,000 state voucher would pay for most of it. But many private schools cost a lot more.

"Some of them are upwards of $10,000 to $14,000 a year," said Principal Sanna Klipfel, Lamb of God.

Compare the $6,300 it costs to educate a child at Lamb of God (LOG) with the $8,682 the Clark County School District (CCSD) spent per pupil three school years ago. (The figure today is even higher.)

The education a child receives at LOG is far superior to what a student can expect to receive in the CCSD. Several CCSD employees send their children to LOG and I once overheard one of them remark that, were their child not able to attend LOG, they would quit their job and homeschool rather than send the child to public school.

Voucher supporters say it creates school competition and improves scores. Opponents say vouchers create an unfair competition.

"The private organizations don't have to adhere to No Child Left Behind. The private organizations don't have to take children with special needs," said Terri Janison, school board president.

There is a very good explanation why private schools don't have to adhere to NCLB. If a private school does a poor job of educating children parents will simply choose not to send their children to the school and it will go out of business.

On the other hand, public schools, no matter how poorly they perform, will continue to force children to attend them. After decades spent pouring increasing amounts of money into failing public schools with little or nothing to show for it, lawmakers responded by imposing accountability measures on them. Whether the particular requirements of NCLB improve public education or not the reality is that the consistently poor performance of public schools demanded some accountability.

While it is true that LOG is able to be much more selective about whom it accepts than public schools, there do exist programs, such as one in Florida, in which special needs students are given vouchers to attend private schools. The vouchers are for less than the state spends per pupil on the overall student population and the program has been successful.

Reid's complaint that vouchers would only help a small minority of students ignores the ability of the market to solve problems. Were the state of Nevada to offer $6,000 vouchers, in a very short time there would be a plethora of schools able to offer a superior education for not much more than $6,000 (and less). The real opposition to vouchers is from those in the education establishment invested in the status quo.

Democratic State Senate Majority Leader Steven Horsford's office says they're "waiting for Sandoval to add to his two-sentence voucher plan" before commenting on his idea.

No matter how long, or for what, he waits, I am certain that Horsford's response to Sandoval's voucher plan will be negative.

A Very Inconvenient Truth

In light of the President's speech announcing the end of the Iraq war, Daniel Henninger explores the alternative history If Saddam Had Stayed. Contrary to the conventional wisdom and unlike most questions about that which never happened, the answer to this question is fairly certain.

It is also quite different from the scenario the President and his allies would like us to believe. As Henninger points out, reports developed from captured documents and interviews with Iraqis describe what would have been - what we would have been powerless to stop.

The definitive account of Saddam's WMD ambitions is the Duelfer Report, issued by the Iraq Survey Group in 2005. Yes, the Duelfer Report concluded that Saddam didn't have active WMD. But at numerous points in the 1,000-page document, it asserted (with quotes from Iraqi politicians and scientists) that Saddam's goal was to free himself of U.N. sanctions and restart his efforts to acquire nuclear weapons and other WMD.

The report: "Saddam wanted to recreate Iraq's WMD capability. . . . Saddam aspired to develop a nuclear capability." The Survey Group described Iraqi plans to develop three long-range ballistic missiles.

Saddam was obsessed with Iran. Imagine the effect on the jolly Iraqi's thinking come 2005 and the rise to stardom of Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, publicly mocking the West's efforts to shut his nuclear program and threatening enemies with annihilation. That year Ahmadinejad broke the U.N. seals at the Isfahan uranium enrichment plant. In North Korea, Kim Jong Il was flouting the civilized world, conducting nuclear-weapon tests and test-firing missiles into the Sea of Japan. In such a world, Saddam would have aspired to play in the same league as Iran and NoKo. Would we have "contained" him?

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Iran and Saddam Hussein in Iraq simultaneously would have incentivized Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia and Sudan to enter the nuclear marketplace. Pakistan and India would be increasing their nuke-tinged tensions, not trying as now to ease them.

We ought to be a lot prouder of our troops coming home from Iraq than we are showing this week. They deserve a monument. That war wasn't just about helping Iraq. It was about us. The march across the nuclear threshold by lunatic regimes is a clear and present danger. The sacrifice made by the United States in Iraq took one of these nuclear-obsessed madmen off the table and gave the world more margin to deal with the threat that remains, if the world's leadership is up to it. A big if.

The Duelfer report also concluded that, upon the lifting of sanctions and resumption of WMD programs, he would once again invade Kuwait. Many people choose to forget that the sanctions regime against Saddam at the time was crumbling. His concerted effort to both undermine the sanctions and the moral foundation for them was proving extremely successful. Members of the UN Security Council had been discussing releasing his regime from them. Had he remained in power for any length of time it is certain that the sanctions would have been lifted.

There were several other beneficial effects that resulted from the removal of Saddam. The AQ Khan network was exposed. Moammar Qaddafi voluntarily terminated his nuclear program. The Palestinian terrorists lost their greatest benefactor and the Second Intifada soon collapsed. American troops were no longer needed in Saudi Arabia. And more.

The United States paid a high price in Iraq. The lives lost can never be replaced. Each one was a husband, father, son, wife, mother, daughter. The impact on those who lost loved ones or whose lives changed forever must not be understated. But we must not minimize their sacrifices or their accomplishments by ignoring or denying what they did for all of us - Iraqis, Americans, people of every nation. They did more than remove a single madman. They changed the course of history. For the better.