No Stupid Questions?

You know the teacher that told you there were no such a thing as a stupid question? Well she lied!

The Muslim Council of Britain demanded police explain why an Asian-looking man, reported as a "suspected suicide bomber" by Sky News, was shot dead at Stockwell station in south London on Friday.

So here is the question the Muslim Council is asking: "You know that guy who was about to blow up the metro and kill dozens of people? Yeah, the one with wires coming out of his bag? Yeah the one who had jumped over the ticket counter and ran into the tube and refused to stop when you asked him.. yeah. .that one.. why did you shoot him?"

Are you freaking kidding me?


Here is the whole article.

I Do Not Consent to Being Searched

This is brilliant. Although the tactics being used by NYPD are the very tactics that I have advocated for some time, I think it is brilliant for a civil libertarian to point out that what the NYPD is doing may fall under the definition of "unreasonable search."

I think there may be a legal argument there.

However, I think it is a weak one. After all, similar searches are conducted at the airport.

More on this later.. along with the promised China post.

Yuan Valuation: Flirting with Disaster

This will be a short post, but expect a much longer post later today.

Today, the government of China finally bowed to US pressure and decided to scrap its decade old peg to the dollar. The new yuan rate versus the dollar revalues the currency by 2.1 percent, to 8.11 per U.S. dollar.

First, various studies, including some from the Federal reserve in Cleveland, have said that the Yuan is overvalued and not undervalued. (Full disclosure: there are plenty of studies pointing the other way as well.) I think this was a can of worms that was better left unopened.

Second, the amount of US debt that China and Japan own is enormous. Has anyone even given a second to think about what the currency floating will do to this? What would happen if some wacko communist party hack decided that it was a good idea to dump all that debt? We could be in a depression in a matter of seconds. I'm not sure we would be, but something tells me that we should be worried about something that has never happened before and that will adversely affect the world's biggest economy.

Third, I am very pro-currency floating. (I'm no crazy libertarian saying central banks should not exist.) But as a friend once told me after he was asked about China's national savings in a consulting interview: it's a freaking communist country, how am I supposed to know what they'll do next? And that is scary.

Tony Blair Proposes Conference on Islamic extremism

I'm not a big fan of conferences. They seem to academic for my liking. But I think this is bang on.

Islamic extremism is a problem that needs to be studied. I don't mean that in a "less do nothing till we study this" way, but in a "let's keep what we are doing, but figure out if there are any easier fixes to the problem."

The Note Chimes in

Folks at the Note, which is probably the best MSM blog out there, have this to say on last night's appointment:

If this process has all the hallmarks of a national political campaign, judging on technical competence, one side looks like the disciplined, well-organized Bush-Cheney campaign of 2004, and one looks more like, say, the Kerry campaign. At least for now.

Perhaps not coincidentally, the one that looks like the Bush-Cheney campaign is . . . uhm . . . the Bush-Roberts campaign. If someone wants to argue that this was not THE best handled and well-researched process ever for a SCOTUS nominee, please tell us what you would suggest tops it.

Right on!

Howard Kurtz agrees with me

Howard Kurtz, of the Washington Post fame, seems to agree with my analysis of the White House's brilliance in leaking Clement first. Here is his article on the issue.

The Bush White House gets a 10 on their handeling of this issue. Brilliant!

Lessons from tonight

As ABC and other reputable sources first broke the news that Judge Clement would not be the President's choice, I was absolutely dumbfounded. I spent a good hour reading everything I could to see a hint. (I found a few things, for example the President refered to the nominee as "he" in the morning presser and Judge Jones was in Huston.) But nowhere did I found any hint of a leak.

1. This is a leakproof whitehouse. I commented to a friend that if this was the Stockwell Day white house, there would be a 1000 leaks about the decision before even Stockwell Day knew it had been made.

2. This is a brilliant white house. It let the press think that the President was about to nomiante Clement. Then the press went to the Dems with that story. The Dems were naturally happy thinking that they've won the fight and gotten the President to appoint another O'Connor. So the Dems came out and talked, in front of the cameras, about how well the consultation process had worked and how they were happy. Then, as soon as the whitehouse had a few Dems on tape and on the record saying the consultations were good, they told ABC that it would not be Clement. This sent the Dems in a tailspin. They looked stupid.

3. This is a conservative white house dedicated to promoting smart people. Everything I've read about Roberts makes me think he will be as good as his mentor, the current Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist.

The Wrong Edith

Rumour mills claim that at 9PM EDT time today, President Bush will nominate the relatively unknown Edith Brown Clement to the Supreme Court. My last hopes that this was all false guessing was vanished when I read that a clerk at her office answered a question by saying "We've been told the only thing we are allowed to say is that she is away."

I wish the President would not appoint Brown. The only thing we know about this woman is that she is uncontroversial (which is often code-word for liberal.) Oh.. and we know that she is against overturning Roe. She has stated that the Supreme Court 'has clearly held that the right to privacy guaranteed by the Constitution includes the right to have an abortion' and that 'the law is settled in that regard.'"

I don't see the political points being scored here. (She is from the South, but it's not like the GOP has problems winning votes in the South.) I do see the possibility of another ideological disaster like Kennedy though. And most importantly, we already know that she will be on the wrong side of the abortion debate.

This President had a chance to turn this court from 6-3 (pro abortion) to 5-4 (still pro abortion.) It's a shame he has chosen to not take this step.

UPDATE:

Ramesh Ponnuru thinks I'm wrong:

[Clement's comments] shouldn't inspire fears among pro-lifers--which, judging from some of the blog commentaries and emails I've been reading, they are. That is precisely the stance that an appeals-court judge has to take, and it says nothing about how that judge would rule if she were on the Supreme Court. Indeed, if an appeals-court nominee didn't say something like that before the Senate, she wouldn't get confirmed. So for pro-lifers to demand that Supreme Court nominees never have made such statements is self-defeating: It means that almost everyone on the bench would have to be wiped off the list of Supreme Court hopefuls. No anti-Roe justice would be able to rise through the ranks.

I say that he may be right, but all I can think of is all these supposedly conservative justices appointed by Republican Presidents who have turned out to be worse that the liberals appointed by Clinton.

Let them bear Arms

According to this, Iraqis have begun forming neigbourhood militias to protect themseleves from suicide killers.

This is the time for the Iraqi politicians to realize the importance of the American second amendment and to formally include it in their own constitution. The second amendment reads:

"A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State,
the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed."

Amen.

America, the not so great

The USA has the lowest percentage among Western nations of children who grow up with both biological parents, 63%, the report says.

"The United States has the weakest families in the Western world because we have the highest divorce rate and the highest rate of solo parenting," Popenoe

Read more in this report.

The US government has, for decades, undertaken many anti-family policies. You know what they say about the chicken, the home, and the roost. Well, I guess in the this case there is no home for the chicken and the roost - just a whole bunch of one night stands.

France: a rapist's haven

I didn't know that France did not have a basic extradition treaty with the United States until I read the tale of Roman Polanski.

So apparently Polanski pleaded guilty to having sex with a guilty to having sex with a 13-year-old girl in the late 70's. He was also charged with rape and five other felonies in 1977. (Follow me so far? Pleaded guilty, not accused, but pleaded guilty.)

Soon after his plea, he flees the US and goes to France because France refuses to extradite child rapists back to the US so that they may face punishment for their crime.

What kind of message does that send to criminals? Rape kids and come to France, we won't send you back. I wonder what Joan of Arch would think of this.

Hmm...