Are We Less Safe Because of Iraq?

That was the story over the weekend but it wasn't exactly true.

Parts of a security assessment prepared six months ago was leaked to the press but only the most damaging parts were leaked. If you look at the entire report you see how slanted the excerpts were edited. For example here is how MSNBC repeated one paragraph:

The war in Iraq has become a "cause célèbre" for Islamic extremists, breeding deep resentment of the U.S. that probably will get worse before it gets better

The paragraph actually says:

The war in Iraq has become a "cause célèbre" for Islamic extremists, breeding deep resentment of the U.S. in the Muslim world and cultivating supporters for the global jihadist movement. Should jihadists leaving Iraq perceive themselves, and be perceived, to have failed, we judge fewer fighters will be inspired to carry on the fight.

Seems a bit different in tone doesn't it? I don't think that I am imagining things if I see this as making the case for "staying the course".

The President makes his case here. He has a lot of good points including pointing out that the report was released in March based on the situation in February. It is so old that it makes repeated references to Abu Mus'ab al-Zarqawi who was killed June, 7.

So why was it leaked in late September? For political gain, of course.

Election 2006

Polls show that the public disapproves with the way that Republicans are running things. Common wisdom says that Democrats will make gains in the upcoming election and may take one or both houses of Congress. Of course, common wisdom also said that the 2004 election was Kerry's to lose. It is possible that common wisdom is actually wishful thinking.

The 2006 campaign has started in earnest and I'm lucky enough (?) to be in two contested districts. Both my representative, Deborah Pryce and my senator, Mike DeWine, have been targeted by out-of-state Democrats and liberals. This gives me a chance to observe the Democrats' strategy close-up.

Understand that the attacks on Pryce and DeWine are opportunistic, not ideological. Both are moderates, Both have been described as RINOs (Republican In Name Only) because of their past records.  The only reason that they have been targeted is because they are seen as vulnerable.

The attacks on Pryce began well before the traditional campaign season. MoveOn ran anti-Pryce ads off and on all Summer. These were very general. Instead of focusing on anything that Pryce did, they focused on things she did not do. These were on the line of, "The world is ending and Deborah Pryce didn't take the lead to stop it from happening."

More recently, Pryce's opponent, Mary Jo Kilroy, has begun airing ads contrasting the budget deficit under President Bush and Pryce with the balanced county budget under Kilroy (Kilroy is a county commissioner). This left her open for a counter-attack pointing out that county sales tax doubled under Kilroy.

DeWine is running against Sherrod Brown. Brown has yet to make an appearance in the campaign (at least I haven't seen him) but an anti-DeWine ad is running. It pictures him with President Bush and complains about the deficit.

That seems to be the strategy so far. The Democrat's only issue is the deficit and links between the Republican and President Bush. the Democrat's strategy is based on several factors. Not all of these are likely to pan out for them.

As I mentioned above, polls show that most people distrust Republicans to run the country. The problem for the Democrats is that nearly as many people distrust them. This could translate into an anti-incumbent election. This gets tricky to predict. Many people distrust the party but trust their local candidate which is why incumbents get re-elected so often.

Democrats are banking heavily on Bush's negative poll numbers. They hope that linking a candidate with Bush will drag the candidate down. Basically they are trying to recreate the strategy that Lamont used on Leiberman. The tricky part here is that Lamont was running in a primary. Associating a Republican with the President in a general election is not the same as tying a Democrat to Bush in a primary. Worse for the Democrats, Bush's approval ratings have gone up.

An additional problem that the Democrats have - the war. Brown and Kilroy are avoiding all mention of it. Voters will eventually want to know what their position is. This is a no-win situation for Democrats. The majority of Americans view an unconditional pull-out as a surrender and this will hurt any candidate who suggests it. On the other hand, the hard-core of Democrats will accept nothing less and may stay at home if their candidate proposes conditions.

So, can Democrats win on little but general voter dissatisfaction and the deficit? Right now the poll say that they can but voter dissatisfaction has a way of evaporating as the election grows close.

On the other hand, neither Pryce nor DeWine has done anything to motivate their Republicans roots. I would have gladly dumped both in 1993 after they crossed the isle to pass Clinton's gun control legislation.

Cognative Dissonance

From the Wikipedia:

Cognitive dissonance is the perception of incompatibility between two cognitions, which can be defined as any element of knowledge, including attitude, emotion, belief, or behavior (in lay men's terms, the uncomfortable tension that comes from holding two conflicting thoughts at the same time). The theory of cognitive dissonance states that contradicting cognitions serve as a driving force that compels the mind to acquire or invent new thoughts or beliefs, or to modify existing beliefs, so as to reduce the amount of dissonance (conflict) between cognitions. Experiments have attempted to quantify this hypothetical drive.

I've written about how we are in a second Cold War, this time with radical Islam. I just wrote about how Muslim rage is being used as a weapon in this war. What is strange is that the Left doesn't see this. Take this exchange. Sam Harris, a card-carrying liberal thinks it is time for the liberals to get involved.

A cult of death is forming in the Muslim world — for reasons that are perfectly explicable in terms of the Islamic doctrines of martyrdom and jihad. The truth is that we are not fighting a "war on terror." We are fighting a pestilential theology and a longing for paradise.

[...] Given the degree to which religious ideas are still sheltered from criticism in every society, it is actually possible for a person to have the economic and intellectual resources to build a nuclear bomb — and to believe that he will get 72 virgins in paradise. And yet, despite abundant evidence to the contrary, liberals continue to imagine that Muslim terrorism springs from economic despair, lack of education and American militarism.

So, what's the response from the Left? To disown Harris, of course. The interesting, and scary, thing is how they do it. Take this entry
from the Huffington Post by RJ Eskow.

Specifically, Harris would not acknowledge the research of Martin E. Marty and the Fundamentalism Project, whose complex multidisciplinary study found several intriguing patterns in the distribution of fundamentalism throughout all faiths.
 
 Among the Project's findings was the discovery that fundamentalists, who average roughly 20% of any major faith today, all seek to acquire power using similar techniques and belief systems. Their beliefs share much more in common with fundamentalists of other faiths than they do with their co-religionists, a finding that challenges the notion that Islam is an especially evil religion.
 
 This finding challenges an assumption that is deeply cherished by Harris and his ilk, and equally beloved by Bauer and the Christian Right: that Muslims are more extremist than other people. That makes great fodder for recruiting wavering Christians to atheism, or convincing Americans who question the Iraq invasion that we're at war with a world of "Islamofascists."

This is the cognitive disconnect in the Left. Whenever someone starts talking about Islamic extremists, they direct their anger at Christian fundamentalists. Take this quote from Rosie O'Donnel    

O'Donnell saved her harshest comments for the war on terror. After Hasselbeck had the temerity to mention the threat of extreme Islam, O'Donnell responded with her slap at Christianity: "And just one second, radical Christianity is just as threatening as radical Islam in a country like America."

So there are no Islamofascists. There are only fundamentalists and Christian fundamentalists have more in common with Islamic fundamentalists than with other Christians.

I took Eskow at his word and looked up Martin E. Marty and the Fundamentalism Project. Not surprisingly, Eskow completely misrepresented their work. Here is how Marty characterizes the two:

As    for futures: combine these fundamentalisms with religious ethnonationalisms    and one finds some of the most perplexing, confusing, puzzling, and bemusing    forces. They are hard to anticipate, locate, or define. They do not fit the    conventions of diplomacy, since such movements "take no prisoners,"    make no compromises, and may resort to forms of terrorism that transcend boundaries    or subvert conventions of warfare.

In    respect to polity, some of them will continue to challenge and replace secular,    pluralist, "compromising" and only nominally religious regimes and    governments, in the name of actively religious, monolithic, absolutist regimes.    They stand more chance of success where what Westerners call "the separation    of church and state" has never occurred either philosophically or constitutionally,    than where they can only hope for a piece of the polity, as in the United States.    Where there was never separation or formal drawing of distinction between religious    and civil spheres, retaking the regime is easier to accomplish than it is in    overwhelmingly secular, pluralist, "republican" nations. In the    latter instance, as in the United States, fundamentalists, if they would gain    power, must coalesce with non-fundamentalist conservatives (as in the old Moral    Majority and the more recent Christian Coalition) and then barter with non-religious    conservatives, where some compromising of purity dilutes the claims. In such    cases, it is easier to stay pure and have influence on local levels—as    at school, clinic, zoning, library and textbook, hospital, and town boards.    But today the local has national significance, as when these coalitions, often    by self-advertised "stealth"-using means, can shape the policies    of a political party, and the platforms that impinge on presidential elections.

Here is a clear distinction between what I would call Islamofascists and the American religious right. One cannot possible mistake a group that resorts to terrorism that transcends boundaries with one that hopes for a piece of the polity.

But we don't need to resort to think-tanks to see the difference. The whole concept of secular government and pluralism grew up within Christianity.  Until the current generation, the leaders of the western world were overwhelmingly Christian.

In the debate over the Pope, much has been made of Christianity's past and it is true that there were forced conversion and other abuses... hundreds of years ago. Beheadings ans stonings are going on in Islamic countries right now. Again, the Left's cognitive dissonance does not let them distinguish between acts by people long dead and by people still alive.

Another of Eskow's points:

Here's Martin Lewis on Islam: "When was the last time agnostics or atheists got offended and went on the rampage when someone trashed - or even questioned - their beliefs?"

You could've said the same thing about blacks after the Los Angeles riots, couldn't you? "When was the last time white people got offended and went on the rampage when someone got let off for a crime against them?"

I'm not defending rioters. I'm simply pointing out some inherent biases in the comment. Ultra-Orthodox Jews have rioted in Israel, and one of them killed the peacemaking Prime Minister. Christians have rioted, too. People tend to riot because they feel powerless, not because they're inherently evil. (Killing's another matter - it's always indefensible.)

And less than one Muslim in 43,000 has ever participated in a riot. (I did the math in a previous post.) Far more Americans have been child molesters, percentage-wise, yet it would be bigotry to say we live in a nation of pederasts.

He is confusing people rioting over conditions affecting their own lives and people rioting over something said half a world away. The los Angeles riots were over treatment of LA blacks by the LA police department. The Jews were rioting over policies that affect the future of their country. Riots happen but they are usually over local issues. And when was the last time that Christians rioted over a slight to Christianity?

If I did my math right, over 23,000 Muslims have rioted. Maybe more if he was only including recent riots.

All of this is a real problem. We are in a long-term war over our values and half of our side doesn't have a clear view of who we are fighting.

Moslem Rage

When I was growing up, a friend learned that he could get me to agree to almost anything by threatening to go home. Finally my mother suggested that I just let him go home and see what would happen. The next day the inevitable, "Do this or I'm going home," came up. I replied, "OK. Bye." My friend stopped in mid-stride and said, "Maybe I can stay a while longer."

I learned a lot about human nature that day. I learned was that you had to be willing to follow through on your threats. You don't want to over-use a threat. Most important - once you give into a threat, you have lost control.

The world needs to learn this last lesson about Muslim rage. For the third time in the last year, Muslims are raging world-wide over a small incident in the west. The first time it was the flushing of a Koran at Guantanamo Bay. It turned out that the incident never actually happened so little came of the rage.

One side-result was the condemnation of reporter who originally broke the story. It was felt my many that he should have known what would happen and been more sensitive to Muslims before writing a story about Koran desecration.

The Mohammad cartoons were a different matter. The Muslim rage was greater as was their success. The West turned its back on issues of freedom of the press and religion. Only one or two major papers in the US dared print the cartoons. In Europe, many nations promised that nothing like this would ever be allowed again. The editor who commissioned the cartoons in the first place made an abject apology. The cartoonists went into hiding with death threats on their heads.

The issue that started the mess - the reluctance of artists to illustrate a child's book on Mohamed for fear of offending Muslims.

The current issue is a remark made by the Pope. This one was ready-made and, to some extent, manufactured by the press. The Pope was giving a talk before a university about different ways to approach God. His point was to justify the Catholic Church's approach. along the way he mentioned Mohamed and the practice of conversion by the sword. While the text the Pope was quoting was ancient and obscure, the issue is not. Just a few weeks ago two Fox reporters announced that they converted while kidnapped with the implication that they were given no choice. Ont he anniversary of 9/11, al Qaeda aired a video telling Americans to become Muslim or die. Unless you believe in forced conversions you have to side with the Pope on this.

But a single line was quoted in the news reports without the context and instantly the Muslims of the world were raging again. Keep in mind that this is not limited to just a country or two. Even an official from officially secular Turkey compared the Pope to Hitler over the remarks.

And the result has been successful. The Pope has issues three apologies. That's two more then the Vatican issued to Galileo. But it is not enough. So far the Pope has apologized for offending Muslims. They are demanding that he repudiate his speech and apologize for having said it.

They want the Pope to be subservient to Islam. The head of the world's largest organized religion needs to be subservient to a different religion.

That's what all of the Muslim rage is about. The people inciting it have found a threat that the West will give in to. Given enough rage and enough time, the Imams hope to eventually make western civilization subservient to Islam. They are instituting sharia (Muslim law) one baby step at a time.

In many ways the orchestrators of Muslim rage are more successful that the outright terrorists. It is easy to recognize merciless killers for what they are and to refuse to give into them. It is something else to refuse when mobs are firebombing churches and shooting nuns.

That's what the world needs to do and should have already done. When the Mohamed cartoons came out, every paper int he West should have printed them with the explanation that this was being done in support of free speech. In the current flap, world leaders should come out in support of the Pope and condemn forced conversion.

It should be made clear to the organizers of these mass protests that we hold our values dear and that attempts to intimidate us will cause us to close ranks.

Unfortunately, that takes more guts than most world leaders have. An exception is Australia's government which read the riot act to Muslims last week.

Anna Applebaum has similar thoughts to mine.

By this, I don't mean that we all need to rush to defend or to analyze this particular sermon; I leave that to experts on Byzantine theology. But we can all unite in our support for freedom of speech -- surely the pope is allowed to quote from medieval texts -- and of the press. And we can also unite, loudly, in our condemnation of violent, unprovoked attacks on churches, embassies and elderly nuns. By "we" I mean here the White House, the Vatican, the German Greens, the French Foreign Ministry, NATO, Greenpeace, Le Monde and Fox News -- Western institutions of the left, the right and everything in between. True, these principles sound pretty elementary -- "we're pro-free speech and anti-gratuitous violence" -- but in the days since the pope's sermon, I don't feel that I've heard them defended in anything like a unanimous chorus. A lot more time has been spent analyzing what the pontiff meant to say, or should have said, or might have said if he had been given better advice.

All of which is simply beside the point, since nothing the pope has ever said comes even close to matching the vitriol, extremism and hatred that pour out of the mouths of radical imams and fanatical clerics every day, all across Europe and the Muslim world, almost none of which ever provokes any Western response at all. And maybe it's time that it should: When Saudi Arabia publishes textbooks commanding good Wahhabi Muslims to "hate" Christians, Jews and non-Wahhabi Muslims, for example, why shouldn't the Vatican, the Southern Baptists, Britain's chief rabbi and the Council on American-Islamic Relations all condemn them -- simultaneously? 

The war Paradigm

America is stuck on three war paradigms. There is WWII, the Good War; Viet Nam, the bad war (also known as the quagmire); and the Gulf War, the quick war. Korea lives up to its reputation as the Forgotten War.

Obviously the Global War on Terror (now the war on Islamo-Fascists) is not a quick war.

Conservatives would like to think of the GWOT as being like WWII. It has a Day of Infamy and some opponents who are clearly evil by our standards. It also featured notable patriotism and a uniting of politicians against a common foe. Liberals are attracted to the WWII idea also but for different reasons. They like to point out that five years into WWII we were clearly winning. They also like to point out the shared sacrifice made during WWII as justification for rolling back tax cuts and jacking up oil taxes.

As seductive as the WWII model is, it doesn't match up. Even if you lump all of the Axis of Evil together they do not match the military power of WWII's Axis. Saddam was the only member to try expanding and that was turned back a decade and a half ago. As for shared sacrifice, that was needed because the entire country was on a war footing. People went without meat and gasoline because it was needed at the front lines. We have no such shortages now.

Viet Nam only works when looking at Iraq, not at the GWOT as a whole. Even Iraq fits the mould poorly. In Viet Nam we were fighting an actual country which in turn was the client state of a world power. In Iraq we are fighting an insurgency fueled by the deposed minority and foreign fighters. With Viet Nam, opponents could honestly say that they believed that being conquered by the VC would be preferable to continued war. In Iraq, everyone agrees that the country will erupt into a violent civil war if we leave too soon.

Then there is the body count. Fewer than 3,000 US soldiers have been killed in five years of fighting the GWOT. Casualty rates in WWII and Viet Nam were much higher.

So how should we look at the GWOT? I think it should be regarded as Cold War II. Consider the similarities.

In the Cold War we were not just opposing the USSR, we were opposing communism. This was a movement which combined economic policy, politics (generally dictatorships), and religion (generally outlawed or forced underground). There were several different movements. Some controlled countries, some were citizens of free countries agitating for change. Not all of these groups tolerated each other.

In the GWOT we are fighting a religious movement which includes economic policy, politics (theocracy), and religion. There are different movements. Some of them hate each other.

There is also the nuclear issue. The Cold War was a proxy war because each side was armed with weapons too destructive to use. In a few years we can expect to see Iran and North Korea similarly armed. They are also testing delivery systems. So far they are way behind where the Russians were in the 1950s but they are working to catch up.

Other similarities - the Cold War dragged on for decades. There was a strong feeling on the Left that we could simply stand down and the other side would respect that and disarm as well. They hated with a passion leaders who stood up to communism.

Some people in the military have recognized the parallels. They refer to this as the Long War.

This conflict is not about Iraq or Osama bin Lauden. It is the secular West vs militant Islam. At the end we will either see Islam brought into the 21st century or we will see Sharia as the law of the land across most of the world.

The Path to Censorship

After watching most of the first half of ABC's The Path to 9/11, I have to wonder what the fuss is about? The show is so long and includes so many events that the scenes that the Democrats object to slip by so fast that they are easy to miss. What is more, it shows notable successes under the Clinton administration as well as failures.

The Democrats' advance reaction has gone past nuclear. Members of Congress have gone on record as insisting on changes. The Democratic leaders of the Senate sent an open letter to Disney questioning their motives and funding.

That Disney would seek to broadcast an admittedly and proven false recounting of the events of 9/11 raises serious questions about the motivations of its creators and those who approved the deeply flawed program. Finally, that Disney plans to air commercial-free a program that reportedly cost it $40 million to produce serves to add fuel to these concerns.

This part can be taken as a threat:

The Communications Act of 1934 provides your network with a free broadcast license predicated on the fundamental understanding of your principle obligation to act as a trustee of the public airwaves in serving the public interest. Nowhere is this public interest obligation more apparent than in the duty of broadcasters to serve the civic needs of a democracy by promoting an open and accurate discussion of political ideas and events.

Disney and ABC claim this program to be based on the 9/11 Commission Report and are using that assertion as part of the promotional campaign for it. The 9/11 Commission is the most respected American authority on the 9/11 attacks, and association with it carries a special responsibility. Indeed, the very events themselves on 9/11, so tragic as they were, demand extreme care by any who attempt to use those events as part of an entertainment or educational program. To quote Steve McPhereson, president of ABC Entertainment, "When you take on the responsibility of telling the story behind such an important event, it is absolutely critical that you get it right."

My reading of this is that rights the government granted can be taken back.

This blogger goes several steps further, advocating a 10+ step program of retaliation against Disney. This includes passing legislation in order to hurt Disney:

Clearly Disney/ABC has a lot of legislation before congress that they care about. I already know of one telecom bill by Senator McCain that they're mortified of - the Consumers Having Options in Cable Entertainment (CHOICE) Act of 2006. I propose that we start a nationwide grassroots campaign to get that bill passed. What other legislation can we push to ensure that companies like Disney/ABC never again try to unethically influence an American election?

So, the Democrats and their cheering section are advocating blatant, heavy-handed censorship. They are not threatening boycotts but direct governmental action. This is the party that claims to be concerned with our civil rights.

I've said it before but a commitment to civil liberties only counts if you protect the things you disagree with.

It should be noted that the protector of our liberties, the ACLU, is AWOL on the subject. I checked their web site and they have no press statements about the movie. They did express concern that residents of New York were being denied access to Hezbollah's satellite channel.

Lost in all of this is the fact that the Path to 9/11 is a serious, well-made production. Yes, in some cases actions were attributed to the wrong person but these actions happened which is the point of the movie. Disney and ABC are to be congratulated.

The Road to 9/11

First off, anyone who supported the CBS Reagan movie three years ago or Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 911 is disqualified from complaining about the Road to 9/11 on grounds of partisan hypocrisy.

[sound of crickets chirping]

My, it got quiet all of a sudden.

I have read reviews of this docu-drama from several people who have actually seen it. They say that it is quite balanced, showing both Clinton and Bush at fault. The thing is, Clinton was in office for years between the first and second World Trade Center attacks and Bush was only in office for eight and a half months. That means that Clinton had a lot of time for missed opportunities (and a lot more time to correct mistakes).

The producers say that they place blame for the attack on the terrorists but they show how the attack could have been stopped at several points. The left has taken this to mean that it is all Clinton's fault. MSNBC Countdown host Keith Olberman used this interpretation and named the ABC producers the "worst people in the world" for it.

The Clinton administration it being prickly about it. There was an aborted plan to kidnap bin Laden and at least two windows when he could have been killed with a missile strike. These were combined into a single plan that was aborted at the last minute. That's what docu-dramas do - they replace lengthy events with short, memorable ones.

There are probably two reasons that the Left is so upset about the movie. The first is that it upsets their world-view that things were fine under Clinton and everything is Bush's fault. This points out that the 9/11 attack was progressing along, missed by everyone like a malignant cancerous growth. It would have happened, even if Gore had won the election.

The Left's second problem is that is hurts their political chances. Howard Dean likes to point out that 9/11 happened under Bush's watch with the implication that we would be safer in his America. More specifically, it hurts the Democratic front-runner who is coincidentally named "Clinton".

It is becoming apparent that the actual importance of issues in the liberal blogosphere is inversely proportionate to its relation to real-life. Just look at the Leiberman/Lamont issue. They replaced a far-left pro-war liberal with a far-left anti-war liberal and called it a significant event.

In the meantime, after weathering an entire industry of anti-Bush media, a movie based on reality must seem like a cake-walk to the Republicans.

Scared Fearless

Whatever you want to call the war with fanatical Islam, it has the Democrats running scared. Of course, they aren't afraid of the side that's trying to kill us, they are afraid of our own side.

They have reason to be. Before the dust had settled on the WTC site, the left has been trying to argue that a) it was all Bush's fault, b) we should treat it as a regular crime and try to extradite the people involved, and c) we should pretend that nothing happened.

The newest attempt at c) is Arriana Huffington's new book On Becoming Fearless. Her thesis is that President Bush is manipulating us through fear. Huffington also opened a new section of her web site devoted to becoming fearless (and promoting her book).

Unfortunately, the world keeps intruding into their little fantasyland. In July, authorities in Florida and Canada announced that they had broken up terrorist rings. These were dismissed by the left as confused but harmless teenagers.

Last month the British authorities announced that they had broken up a plot to blow up airplanes. This was originally dismissed by the left as nothing but Bush propaganda. When it was pointed out that the report came from the British, not the Bush administration, they regrouped and started insisting that it is too difficult to make explosives. Regardless of how impossible the Left thinks it would have been, most of the people arrested left martyrdom videos proving that they thought that they were going to die along with everyone around them.

Next came the attempted German train bombings. This got a lot less press, either because it did not affect airport lines or because there was no question of the terrorists having (almost) working bombs.

Now the Danish announced that they arrested a group of terrorists. This group had explosives and the Danes felt that it was too risky to continue to watch them. So, what will the Left say about that? It's hard to say. I've been watching Huffington and have yet to see it mentioned on either the news of blog tabs. My guess is that they will either ignore it completely or downplay it.

Regardless, there are people who want to kill us and their definition of "us" is pretty broad. The Germans thought that they were immune because they supported Saddam. They were wrong. The Danes have been fairly sympathetic to Muslims, even promising restrictions on the press after the Mohamed cartoons but that wasn't enough, either.

The left and some on the right have argued that all we need to do is "re-deploy" out of the Middle East and end support for Israel and all will be forgiven. Europe is learning that this is not enough.

What Huffington calls fearlessness is much like walking across a street with your eyes closed and your ears covered and insisting that warnings about oncoming cars are fearmongering.

The World's Newest Crisis - Not Enough People Are Starving

According to a recent wire report, there are now more overweight people in the world than the undernourished. During most of civilization, this would be cause for world-wide celebration. Famine has been one of humanity's greatest concerns for millennia. We created civilization in order to escape hunger (really). What's more, recent studies have shown that being well-nourished during gestation and the first two years has measurable benefits throughout one's life.

So what's the problem? According to experts,

An obesity pandemic threatens to overwhelm health systems around the globe with illnesses such as diabetes and heart disease, experts at an international conference warned Sunday.

Since the studies I quoted earlier show that proper nutrition in early life reduces heart problems this doesn't seem right. In fact, it must have come from the discredited study released by the CDC and retracted shortly afterwards.

There have been studies that show an increase in health problems related to inactivity and poor nutrition. Some studies actually show a slight health benefit to being slightly overweight. (I've linked to these before but I'm too lazy to look them up again.) These studies are normally ignored because current styles emphasize low body-fat. Doctors are letting aesthetics dictate science.

If this coming pandemic was going to happen then we would already be seeing the leading edges in the US. Instead, death rates from cardiovascular disease have been declining for decades.

The ACLU - Still Going Crazy

Last week a church group blessed a public school in Columbus, Ohio. They did it from the outside which is open to the public. The principal watched from her nearby yard but did not participate or comment. In fact, no school officials appear to have been involved.

So, of course the ACLU tried to stop it. As I have complained before, they are not about the separation of church and state. They are about suppression of all public demonstrations of Christianity.

Since no government officials were involved, this was entirely a private act. People from other religions are also able to bless the school if they feel the need.

If the ACLU had gotten their way, government officials would have interfered in a group practicing their religion. I have a hard time seeing how that passes constitutional muster.

Taking it to the Extreme

The old saying says that "the enemy of my enemy is my friend." Cindy Sheehan and Code Pink take that to the extreme. They hate President Bush so the are friends with... the Baathists we overthrew in Iraq.

Cindy and Code Pink recently went to Jordan to meet with a group of Sunni politicians from the Iraq Parliament. While billed as the "5th largest collition" they actually control only 11 of 275 seats making them about as representative of their country as Code Pink is of ours.

Regardless, they hammered out a peace agreement which reads more like an unconditional surrender. The terms are:

The common thread among this diverse group of Iraqis and Americans was a desire to set a timetable for the withdrawal of US troops, ensure no permanent bases in Iraq, and secure a U.S. commitment to pay for rebuilding Iraq. Other issues that emerged in two-days of intensive talks include the need to dismantle militias, provide amnesty for prisoners and the various armed groups, compensate victims of the violence, revise the Constitution and preserve the unity of Iraq, and reverse US-imposed de-Baathification and economic policies. We left this historic meeting with a commitment to make sure that the voices of these Iraqi parliamentarians are heard here in the US, and we will bring a group of them to the U.S. in the Fall.

Note - Code Pink feels the need to use pink fonts.

To restate the terms, the US will disarm all non-sunnis, reverse all democratic changes in the government and put the Baathists back in charge. We will then leave but continue to pay reparations to Iraq for daring to free them from a tyrant.

Just to be certain that we get the message, another member of the delegation tells how perfect things were in Iraq when Saddam was in charge.

Let’s go back to the Iraq before we invaded, there was a good education and health care system, food for everyone. That system didn’t belong to Saddam it belonged to the Iraqi, it belonged to years of creating what a civilization needed. If your parents didn’t send you to school they could be put in jail.

We are talking about the same man who used poison gas on the Kurds, drained the marshes in order to displace the Marsh Arabs, and built palaces with money skimmed from the Oil for Food program. Under Saddam, someone sent to Abu Grahib would be far more likely to have a limb cut off than to pose naked.

Probably the most perverse aspect of the trip was that one of the Iraqi delegates included Sheikh Ahmad al-Kubaysi who has donated millions to the cause of al-Sadr. In case you came in late, Cindy started her crusade against President Bush after her son was killed by al-Sadr's forces.

More on the trip here.

Unreliable Reporting

Nothing earthshaking here like the discovery of faked photos in the news. Just a complaint about press coverage in general and how false stories keep making the headlines.

First there is the circus around the JonBenet murder. Yes, John Mark Karr is a creepy guy but by the second day it was obvious that he had made up the confession. That didn't stop the press from covering his every move for the eleven days afterwards. Even if he was guilty, why did we need to know the details of his flight to America?

Then there was the fuss over the Plame leak. As it turns out, the leak came from a non-political source and was not an attempt to silence Bush critics by revealing their secrets. It was just a slip by a state department official who liked to gossip and didn't realize that Plame was still classified "undercover".

This one got so much coverage because the left was sure that there was something to the allegations. As recently as Easter they were insisting that the source was Karl Rove and that he was about to be arrested and frog-marched to jail.

The supposedly neutral press should have seen how thin this reasoning was and given the story a lot less coverage.

Then there is Katrina. On the first anniversary of the disaster I have yet to see someone point out how stupid it is to build a city in a hole located between a major river and a huge lake. It is even more stupid to talk about rebuilding the lowest parts of the city without raising them twenty feet or more but here we are. All of the coverage seems to be on how long it is taking people to rebuild, not on the likelihood of their new houses being washed away again.

Then there are the doctored pictures of Katie Couric. When the story is about a news division doctoring pictures of itself you know things are out of control.

Hoping for an Attack

Russell Shaw at the Huffington Post is hoping for an October surprise - one by terrorists. He figures that a major terrorist attack just before the election would give the election to the Democrats. He goes so far as to compare innocents killed in an attack like this to the American soldiers killed in WWII.

But on the other hand, I remind myself that without the ultimate sacrifice paid by 400,000 U.S. soldiers in World War II, tyranny could well have an iron grip on the world, and even on this nation.

 

[...] What if another terror attack just before this fall's elections could save many thousand-times the lives lost?

 

He then engages in some strange math. He assumes that the new Democratic majority will pass everything they've talked about and it will all work extraordinarily well. He also puts the current administration in the worst possible light. His list of lives saved includes:

Block the next Supreme Court appointment, one which would surely result in the overturning of Roe and the death of hundreds if not thousands of women from abortion-prohibiting states at the hands of back-alley abortionists;

Be in a position to elevate the party's chances for a regime change in 2008. A regime change that would:

Save hundreds of thousands of American lives by enacting universal health care;

Save untold numbers of lives by pushing for cleaner air standards that would greatly reduce heart and lung diseases;

More enthusiastically address the need for mass transit, the greater availability of which would surely cut highway deaths;

Enact meaningful gun control legislation that would reduce crime and cut fatalities by thousands a year;

Fund stem cell research that could result in cures saving millions of lives;

Boost the minimum wage, helping to cut down on poverty which helps spawn violent crime and the deaths that spring from those acts;

Be less inclined to launch foolish wars, absence of which would save thousands of soldiers' lives- and quite likely moderate the likelihood of further terror acts.

Even assuming that any of this passed, his numbers are off. Universal Health Coverage ends up applying cost/benefit ratios to medical care with the result that health care is leveled instead of improved. Air and water standards across the board are as high or higher than during the Clinton administration and there is little evidence that tighter regulation will result in measurable benefits. Justifying mass transit in order to cut highway deaths is a major stretch. Gun control is at best neutral. At worst, it increases crime. Stem cell research might result in major cures or it may not but it has been oversold. Current proposals for boosting the minimum wage fall short of curing poverty and will boost chronic unemployment.

Then there is the question of "foolish wars". As of 9/11/6 President Bush had not engaged in any wars, foolish or otherwise. The wars we engaged in under Clinton didn't moderate the terrorists one bit.

This is one more example of Bush Derangement Syndrome. Shaw has convinced himself that Bush is worse than the terrorists so it would be better for them to succeed if it causes Bush to fail.

 

Are We Safer?

As we approach the 5th anniversary of 9/11/1, and an attempt at destroying British airplanes foiled just two weeks ago, it is natural to ask if we are safer now than we were?

I think so for the following reasons.

First, terrorists are not going to hijack planes and crash them into buildings. Not only are passengers being screened more carefully but other, more crucial changes have occurred. One is that airplanes now have heavier doors protecting the pilots. Equally important are the changes in attitude. On September 11, the policy for handling hijackers was treat it as a ransom situation and to cooperate. Now the pilots know that if they open the locked door to the cabin, everyone could be killed. Similarly the passengers know that they will die if they cooperate so they might as well resist.

We are safer from plots in general. Agencies are looking for terrorists and sharing information. This does not stop small, closed groups like the one that committed the London subway bombing last year but it does stop larger, more complex organizations like the one this month. Information was shared between the British, Americans, and Pakistani officials. Threats are being taken seriously and tips are being collected from unlikely sources.

One of the biggest things that has made us safer was George Bush's infamous statement, "You are either with us or against us." Liberals hate this statement but it has made a huge difference in international relations.

Prior to 9/11, Pakistan was openly friendly to the Taliban. In fact the Taliban grew out of Islamic schools in the mountains of Pakistan near Afghanistan. After 9/11, the Pakistani government supported the US. They allowed us to use their country as a staging ground for the attack on Afghanistan, they allow us to pursue al Qaeda and the Taliban in the mountains, they even supported us when we made an air strike against the family of a high-ranking al Qaeda member. And they shared information about the British plot. They also reigned in their nuclear scientists.

While there is still a significant population in Pakistan who is against the US, their government at least supports us.

Libya also took Bush's warning to heart and abandoned its nuclear program. This is important and often overlooked but Libya was close to creating their own bombs.

Does anyone think that the sanctions on Iraq would not have been lifted by now and Saddam would be reconstituting his nuclear program by now if we hadn't invaded? The threat of a nuclear Iran alone is enough to ensure it.

It is worrying that two countries with ties to terrorism, Iran and North Korea are close to building nuclear bombs. It would be even more terrifying if Libya and Iraq were also working on nukes and Pakistan, which has them, was still friendly with terrorists.

So are we safe? No. As I said, small, closed groups of terrorists are nearly impossible to stop. But there are limits to the damage they can do.

In Denial

The left is convinced that there is no War on Terror. Here is a typical example from the Huffington Post.

A lot of people who oppose the Iraq War say the Afghanistan War was justified, but I'm not so sure: it wasn't Afghanistan who attacked us, and even if they were hiding Osama, the thing to do would have been to have him extradited.

Except we demanded that bin Laden be extradited and the Taliban threatened us.

Or maybe 9-11 wasn't the beginning after all. We know the Iraq War was being planned before 9-11, and probably the concurrent crackdown on constitutional liberties as well. The Bush cabal was just waiting for a Pearl Harbor-type incident to implement its plans.

This is a recurring theme - Bush knew ahead of time and was already planning to abridge civil liberties. Why? Because he's evil. Bwaa ha ha!

Other examples of denial - in 2004, the Democrats insisted that Bush was manipulating the terror alerts. There were no real threats to America, They were just distractions.

The current version of this is that recent terrorist arrests are not real. The group in Florida is dismissed as "just teenagers" who were all talk. The Canadian group is similarly dismissed. After all, they didn't even have any explosive (they would have if they had contacted a real supplier instead of a government agent).

At first the Left's reaction to the British bombing plot was the same - just Bush manufacturing a terrorist plot in order to distract people from the "historic" win by Lamont. They backed off a bit when it was pointed out that this came from the Blair government. Next articles such as this one started appearing insisting that the poor terrorists could never have actually created a working bomb in flight. The Left jumped on this. The Brits jumped the gun at Bush's urgings in order to take the heat off of Israel. The terrorists were all talk.

The fact that the terrorists were already booking test flights and making martyrdom videos shows that they thought that they could make bombs. Never mind all of that. The American Left knows best.

There is a reason for this pattern of denial. As long as the War on Terror or on Islamic Fascists is real then a reasonable person might agree with some or all of Bush's actions, especially domestic ones such as the Patriot Act and wiretapping foreign agents, even if they call the US.

Ironically, the wiretapping was an element in gathering information on the British terrorists.

But, is there is no war of terror then we are back to Bush grabbing power because he is evil. For some reason, the Left wants to believe that the President of the United States is an evil dictator who plots to see Americans dead so that he can advance his nefarious plans. This is more comforting to them then the idea that foreigners might want to kill Americans for reasons that pre-date the Bush administration.

For a group that thinks of themselves as "Reality-based", they are living in a fantasy land.

I wonder how they are going to explain away the newest reports - the British found explosives. See here. The video announcing the finds is here.

"However, we must be realistic. The threat from terrorism is real, it is here, it is deadly and it is enduring."

Fat Heads

Two articles in the new caught my eye. The first one says that the Chinese are now having an obesity crisis with one in five overweight or obese. Note this part on how they figured it.

In China, nationwide, 215 million people out of a total population of 1.3 billion were found to be either overweight or obese in a national survey in 2002, based on definitions given by the World Health Organization.

However, the author of the report, Yangfeng Wu of the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences in Beijing, thought the figure should be higher because the WHO definitions were designed for Caucasian populations.

According to stricter measurements given by the Working Group on Obesity in China, about 281 million people in China would be regarded as either overweight or obese, he said.

So, on the personal opinion of Yanfeng Wu, nearly 70 million people were re-classified as obese.

But is the BMI of any worth at all? Not according to this article.

Writing in Friday's Lancet medical journal, the researchers from the Mayo Clinic College of Medicine, Rochester, Minn., found that patients with a low BMI had a higher risk of death from heart disease than those with normal BMI.

At the same time overweight patients had better survival rates and fewer heart problems than those with a normal BMI.

This ties in with something I had written a few days ago. At that time I was looking at an article comparing the health of modern people with their ancestors. The finding was that the modern people were much healthier but are overweight according to their BMIs. By contrast, their ancestors who died younger and had chronic illnesses had "normal" BMI.

But, just to show that once a piece of bad science gets out it can never be recalled, the article on BMIs has this paragraph:

About 30,000 people in Britain die due to obesity every year and 300,000 in the United States where the condition is now thought to have overtaken smoking as the main cause of preventable death.

This came from a news release by the CDC a few years ago. It was retracted within days. There were three major flaws in it:

1. It was actually based on studies of people with poor nutrition and lack of exercise, not obesity.
2. The death rate was accidentally multiplied by ten. The actual death rate should have been listed as 30,000 for the US instead of 300,000.
3. It was discovered that higher body mass has health benefits which, when factored in, almost reduce the number of deaths from obesity to zero. Note that this finding has been confirmed by this article.
   

In fact, since the revised CDC report came out, the emphasis on obesity has changed. Rather than causing increased deaths, it is now stressed that obesity will cause non-lethal health problems such as diabetes.

It should be no surprise that a calculation invented between 1830 and 1850 is a poor indication of health. They were still bleeding people that far back and the idea of washing hands before doing surgery was just taking root. Is seems rather silly to use a 19th century measure to figure ideal body weight.

Islamic Fascists

Last week, after news of the planned terrorist attack came out, President Bush said

It was a "stark reminder," President Bush said in his first public reaction to the events, that "this nation is at war with Islamic fascists," seeking to destroy freedom-loving societies.

The CAIR (Council on American/Islamic Relations) spokesman immediately denounced this term.

"Unfortunately, your statement this morning that America 'is at war with Islamic fascists' contributes to a rising level of hostility to Islam and the American-Muslim community," wrote Parvez Ahmed, board chairman of the Washington-based Council on American-Islamic Relations in an open letter to President Bush Thursday.

"You have on many occasions said Islam is a 'religion of peace'," he wrote. "Today you equated the religion of peace with the ugliness of fascism."

Of course, Bush did not do that. Bush was referring to a specific group of Islamic radicals. CAIR is the one insisting that any reference to a Muslim must be a reference to all Moslems.

MSNBC questioned the term, implying that it is a new one invented by neo-conservatives. They even suggested that the term was invented by Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pa. as part of his re-election campaign. Since I have been seeing conservative writers use this and the shorter Islamo-fascism for years, this is a strange article. It goes on to question if fascism can be applied to the goals of the terrorists.

Stanford University linguist Goeffrey Nunberg argues that fascism is not really the right word to describe this global terror network.

"There's no historical or philosophical connection between al-Qaida and fascism," says Nunberg, an expert on the language of politics. "They're creepy people, but that doesn't mean they're fascist."

The word fascism is usually associated with a particularly oppressive government, almost always hostile to religious clerics, he says. In the United States, it is most commonly associated with Hitler's bloody Nazi regime.

Nunberg says the term "fascist" has been broadly abused throughout the last few decades — by the Left and the Right to mean anyone, or even anything, oppressive and cruel. Although it has lost its definition, he says, it retains its emotional impact.

"Fascism is the epitome of evil," he says. "If you want to say something is as evil as evil can be, then its fascism."

Definitions aside, Nunberg says if the administration wants to stay the course in Iraq, and push difficult but unpopular security policies, its choice of words might be effective.

"Given that they have decided on this strategy, then the analogies to fascism seem rhetorically the smart thing to do in a certain sense," he says. "You want to evoke these 'just wars' of the past."

Is this true? There is no connection between al-Quaida (a recent invention) and fascism (which died with Franco in 1975). There were strong connections with most of the Arab countries and fascism, especially Nazism during WWII.

Is fascism almost always hostile to religious clerics? Not according to the Wikipedia entry on fascism:

Some expressions of fascism have been closely linked with religious political movements. This combination is referred to as Clerical fascism, a prime example of which is the Ustashe in Croatia.

Also, fascism, especially the Nazi variety, has been openly hostile to Jews. Hamas and Hezbollah have endorsed Hitler's Final Solution .

The government that bin Laden wants to establish across the world sounds very much like this:

Fascism is also typified by totalitarian attempts to impose state control over all aspects of life: political, social, cultural, and economic.

Other relevant sections:

Fascism in Italy arose in the 1920s as a mixture of syndicalist notions with an anti- materialist theory of the state; the latter had already been linked to an extreme nationalism. [...] It tended to reject the Marxist notion of social classes and universally dismissed the concept of class conflict, replacing it instead with the struggle between races, and the struggle of the youth versus their elders. This meant embracing nationalism and mysticism, and advancing ideals of strength and power as means of legitimacy, glorifying war as an end in itself and victory as the determinant of truth and worthiness.

All of this seems very much like the restored Caliphate that bin Laden wants to create.

So, why did a major news outlet go to lengths to discredit this term?

ACLU vs Christianity

Last year during Hurricane Katrina, 129 residents of Louisiana's St. Bernard Parish were killed. The Parish is erecting a memorial which will be dedicated on August 29 on the first anniversary of the deaths. The memorial includes a stainless steel cross with the face of Jesus. Obviously the ACLU objects.

 

So what is the basis of their objection? Are public funds paying for the cross? No, it is privately funded. Is it being built on public land? Again, no, it is being built on private land. So what could they possibly object to? It will be visible from a public waterway, specifically the Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet which is blamed for much of the devastation in New Orleans.

 

The ACLU also says that, since the Parish government approved putting up some kind of memorial and the memorial later chosen is religious, it violates the ban on government endorsement of religion.

 

The ACLU is worried that an unsuspecting non-Christian will be travelling thought the MRGO, look up and see a 13 foot cross on private land and feel government pressure to switch to Christianity.

 

This article has a few choice quotes.

 

[...] parish President Henry 'Junior' Rodriguez had a simple reply to the assertion: 'They can kiss my ass.'

 

[...]ACLU Louisiana Executive Director Joe Cook said the Parish Council approved the monument and was therefore sanctioning a religious symbol.

Of Rodriguez`s quip, Cook said he`d prefer if Rodriguez 'would kiss the Constitution.'

While the ACLU likes to make use of the Constitution, they do not actually believe in it. They have defined their own standards of civil liberties. One of these is freedom from any reminders of Christianity. Clearly, if there is no government money or land involved then the government should stay neutral. Instead, the ACLU wants to government to intervene to stop a religious monument from being erected.

 

Somehow the irony of trying to use the Constitution to suppress private observance of religion escapes the ACLU.
 

 

 

The Enemy at Home and Abroad

I'm actually writing about who the American Left sees as its enemies. It's a fairly short list. At the top is George Bush (or a composite of Bush, Rove, Cheney, etc.). He is followed closely by Joe Lieberman, the nation of Israel, and finally al Qaeda. Here's my reasoning.

First, Lieberman has gotten a lot of ink recently. Currently rage against him is white hot. The Left has called on Democratic leaders in Congress to strip Lieberman of all committee assignments. They would like to see him resign, right now. They would really like to see him stood up in front of the Senate and have his buttons cut off and his sword broken (as in a 19th century dishonorable discharge).

They keep presenting their rage at Lieberman as being anti-war but it isn't. It's anti-Bush. Just look at the campaign. Lamont's biggest boost was a shot of Bush bending forward to have a quiet word with Lieberman. It has been presented as Bush kissing Lieberman on the cheek, "The Smooch". I've seen Lieberman refereed to as Bush's "handmaiden". It was not Lieberman's support for the war that lost him the primary, it was his support for "Bush's war."

So, while they are showering Lieberman with invectives, the person they really hate is Bush.

Note - the primary results should not be taken as meaning anything. The election was a referendum on Bush conducted by the anti-Bush wing of a blue state. No one really cared where Lieberman stood on any other issues. They just wanted to punish a Democrat for being too friendly with Bush.

That takes care of the first two items on the list. Next comes Israel. The Left has been quietly blaming Israel for 9/11 since 9/12/2001. When they talk about root causes, they mean US support for Israel. Currently Israel is in a fight with a terrorist group shooting missiles across the Lebanese boarder. The terrorists, Hezbollah, hide themselves and their munitions among the civilian population ensuring that any attempts by Israel to fight back will cause civilian casualties. So who is condemned? Israel, of course.

This morning it was reveled that al Qaeda was plotting to blow up several airplanes, killing hundreds or thousands of people. The response from the Left is illuminating. I'm using the Huffington Post as a proxy for the Left in general. Other sites tend to be even more extreme.

Peter Laarman thinks that the plot was a response to the Israel/Hezbollah conflict.

How must it have enraged the Sunnis who lead al Qaeda to see Hezbollah, a Shia-led movement, become the darling of the Arab "street," even drawing many Sunnis into its orbit of fans? Now we have al Qaeda's answer to such humiliation. Hezbollah might be able to thwart the IDF's drones and even tanks, but it's not yet ready to put the world on Red Alert. Al Qaeda can and just did.

In his zeal to place blame, Laarman ignores that the al Qaeda plot must have started long before the current conflict with Hezbollah. He also tries to blame Dick Cheney through use of a straw man argument.

Donnie Fowler blames Bush for taking his eye off the ball.

Truth is, Bush has not fought back at the real enemy. He picked a fight with Iraq that he said was going to be easy. He picked a fight that Cheney said would end with flowers and cheers by those the USA liberated. But they didn't pick a fight with those who really committed the crime.

Somehow he forgot the invasion of Afghanistan and all of those terrorist surveillance programs that the Left has been complaining about.

This one by Sheldon Drobny takes the prize.

Does anybody out there see the relationship between these two news items? Sure you do. About 4 weeks ago the Justice Department uncovered a terrorist cell in Florida that was planning to blow up the Sears Tower in Chicago. It turns out that these "terrorists" were a few black kids falling for am undercover entrapment so they could support their drug habit.

Today's announcement from our ally, the UK, suggests that 21 people were arrested for planning a massive bombing of flights from the UK to the United States.

That's comforting - there aren't any real terrorist plots against us, just ones that the government tricks confused black kids into falling for. We were never in any real danger. That London bombing on 7/7/2005 never happened. There are no British Muslims willing to kill themselves and everyone around them. Bush just made it up to distract us from Lieberman's defeat.

Russell Shaw says the same thing.

Earlier today U.K. authorities announced they had arrested 24 suspects in a massive plot to blow up 10 airliners.

And of course, President Bush and Department of Homeland Insecurity chief Michael Chertoff used the occasion to tell us that we are all still vulnerable to terror attacks from Al-Qaeda.

This news comes less than a day after an interview in which Veep Cheney said that Joe Lieberman's defeat in Connecticut is likely to give comfort to the same Al-Qaeda by showing we- or at least the Democratic portion of "we," are soft on terrorism.

[...] Not saying the plot can't be real, but if you remember the history of how these things unfold, it often turns out a few days after these arrests, that all these clowns did was conspire on Internet chat rooms and via instant messenger.

Do you see the pattern? Despite terrorist attacks around the world for years with one big one here, they don't believe the threat. They hate Bush so much that they believe that all evil flows from him.

Climate Porn and War Porn

Here's an interesting concept - Climate Porn.

The "apocalyptic" way in which climate change is often portrayed in the press and on government websites succeeds only in "thrilling" people while undermining practical efforts to tackle the problem, according to Labour's favourite thinktank, the Institute for Public Policy Research.

In other words, by overselling the effects of Global Warming, the climate alarmists are making the situation sound so hopeless that people feel it is out of their control. This is nothing new. When the environmental movement started around 1970 the media was full of stories about it was "already too late". This long track-record of scare stories is one reason I've been a global warming sceptic.

At the same time, the article goes on:

He added: "Government and green groups should avoid giving the impression that 'we are all doomed'. The focus should be on the big actions that people can take to address climate change, like switching to a hybrid car, fitting a wind turbine or installing cavity wall insulation, not just small ones such as turning down the thermostat or switching off the lights."

This is the other half of the equation. Warming is being over-sold but the steps needed to stop it are undersold. Turning down the thermostat and shutting off lights will not cut your energy use by 60%. For that matter, neither will switching to a hybrid car and adding wall insulation so even this article undersells the societal changes needed.

In a sort-of-related matter, a wire-service photograph of Beirut was Photo Shopped to make damage from Israeli bombing seem worse than it was. This could be called War Porn - news being sensationalized in order to inspire a reaction.

The old news media stresses the need for editorial control in order to assure accuracy. So where is this? It seems that the MSM is broken. It probably always has been, we just didn't notice.