And is mentioned in the NYT and the Washington Post.

Chuck Schumer: Terrorists Could Alter Ship ‘Manifolds’

New York Sen. Charles Schumer said Thursday he’s worried that if a Dubai company takes ownership of U.S. ports, terrorists might alter what he described as port “manifolds” – an apparent reference to shipping manifests.

Explaining that the port’s owner would be involved in inspecting shipments, Schumer told radio host Don Imus. “They’re involved just like any other company in making sure what’s on the manifold is [what’s] in the container.”

But when a Democrat does it, it is just a slip of the tongue and not worth reporting.

Austin Bay looks at documents that were captured from Al Qaeda sources and translated in 2002. They certainly make it clear that Al Qaeda does not consider the war to be simply against the U.S. They consider it a global effort including “information” warfare as well as military strikes. In their view, the war in Afghanistan, Somalia, Chechnya, Indonesia and the Phillipines are all part of the same effort.

Austin Bay Blog – The Al Qaeda Documents: Al Qaeda Operations in Somalia, thoughts about Chechnya, plus a view of Bill Clinton

The writer believes Somalia is a“splendid victory” with “profound implications ideologically, politically, and psychologically.” Al Qaeda’s writer adds: “The Somali experience confirmed the spurious nature of American power and that it has not recovered from the Vietnam complex. It fears getting bogged down in a real war that would reveal its psychological collapse at the level of personnel and leader.”

His conclusion: “When the enemy abandons the battleground, he must not be allowed to flee. He must be pursued from one position to the next until rooted out.”

In Al Qaeda’s context, 9/11 was “pursuit” of its American enemy—the one that fled Somalia.

This is contrary to some people’s belief that the “War on Terror” should have been confined to the borders of Afghanistan and we should not have gone anywhere else.

It also seems very plain to me that if we commit forces to Darfur they will be attacked by Al Qaeda just as they have been in Iraq.

We cannot run away, they will follow.

For some reason or another the Saddam tapes have been kind of shut down

Here’s what was said

Former military intelligence officer and Arabic expert Bill Tierney is the man who revealed the Saddam tapes, translating them somewhat differently from ABC/Nightline. In the first segment of Pajamas Medias’ coverage of the Intelligence Summit, we hear portions of Tierney’s opening speech at the Summit followed by an interview which ends in a most surprising manner:

Read the whole thing and especially the link to this.

Armed and Dangerous

Religions are good at filling that kind of nothing. Accordingly, if transational progressivism actually succeeds in smothering liberal individualism, its reward will be to be put to the sword by some flavor of jihadi. Whether the eventual winners are Muslims or Mormons, the future is not going to look like the fuzzy multicultural ecotopia of modern left fantasy. The death of that dream is being written in European banlieus by angry Muslim youths under the light of burning cars.

If Transnational Progressivism succeeds in smothering liberal individualism, I want to be last liberal (classic) ala Butch and Sundance at the last shootout in the last corner of the free world. (Not that I’ll live that long, I hope) (Yes Luke, there is another)

Not even OT. I went in late this morning. (02/21/06) I have to take so many hours off per month to make the twelve hour shifts work. So when I worked twelve today it was not OT.

I had to work from 10 AM to 10 PM. I hate is when you go in expecting to work eight hours and have to work twelve.

I was not real understanding with the callers today. Not really rude, just not sympathetic with the guy that knew he had to get a copy of a court order and calls at five minutes after five PM complaining that no one would help him.

Hey, genius. The court close at 5 PM. It’s not a secret.

Or the woman calling from California that wants to complain about her ex-husband putting her kids in the corner for misbehaving. When did the cops become time-out monitors? I seem to have missed the ORS on that.

It’s a good thing I work with a good bunch of people. They seem to like me. Go figure.

I’m a dispatcher. That means I’m a control freak. But I’m dispatching Sheriff’s Deputies and Firemen. They’re control freaks too. Irresistible force… meet Immoveable object.

Had a fire in a grass seed warehouse yesterday. Do you know about seed warehouses? They explode. I was very nervous. It didn’t help that I was having brain farts and forgetting where things were that have been in the same place for the past 5 years. It also didn’t help that it was a volunteer department. Although in their defense, they have been the top rated volunteer department in the state for the past few years. The chief is an asshole. Sometimes that’s what it takes. I don’t mind working with assholes as long as they know what they’re doing, and he does. But volunteers do what they do because they like the lights and sirens. They’re all “breaker, breaker” on the radio.

Oh, well. No one died. No one was hurt and the building did not burn down. I’ll take that as a win.

Just shut up John. You’re embarrassing yourself.

OK. It’s late. I’ll shut up

Risk of Robbery Raising Stakes Of Poker Nights

No one tracks the number of poker-game heists because they are recorded simply as robberies, and many go unreported by hosts fearful of gambling charges. But police across the region and nation say private games are ripe for robberies.

If someone wants to gamble, let them. Concentrate on the robbery, not the gambling.

Prohibition is a losing game. Be it gambling, prostitution, alcohol or drugs. People gonna do what they gonna do.

Deal with it!

Isn’t it amazing how the news media will believe, based on pure speculation, that Vice President Cheney was drunk when he accidentally shot his hunting partner, but when Saddam Hussein talks about WMD on tape it means nothing at all.

Postponing Reality by Thomas Sowell

Measure 37 was upheld unanimously by the Oregon Supreme Court.

That Marion County court decision was too ridiculous to stand. The People don’t have the right to interfere with the way their elected representatives are doing their jobs? Come on. Even pretending to believe that should be embarrassing

So now can we quit hearing about how awful it is and start trying to figure out how to make it work?

There are those who are going to try to turn back the clock to the days when the government could just ignore any property rights as long as they claimed to be doing it for the public good. They should not prevail.

There are also going to be those that maintain that a private property owner can do whatever he wants on his own property. That should not prevail either.

The loudest voices are going to be from the Environmental Lobby. They have grown used to the idea that they can schmooze a small number of legislators or enough voters in the urban areas to take control of other people’s property without worrying about the price. For them there was no price.

That’s why the title of this post. If you want to have all these restrictions, you must pay. That way you can decide if it is worth it. Free was a good price, but one that is no longer offered.

Today must be the day for the Post to do their pieces required to demonstrate racial sensitivity.

When Signs Said ‘Get Out’

This story is about a professor who wrote a book on “Sundown” towns. That is towns that had a sign on the outskirts saying something like “Nigger, don’t let the sun set on you in this town” or something similar.

I’ve heard of these signs. There was supposed to be one up around Sweet Home, which is about twenty miles from here. Funny thing, that. I have found that this story has a lot of characteristics of what is termed an “Urban Legend”. The author admits that the signs are no longer there, and there is a lot of question about whether they actually existed or are the stuff of legend.

“Urban Legends” or “War Stories” as they were called in the military, have one main characteristic. They were never actually witnessed by whoever is doing the telling, but always attributed to a friend, an uncle, a First Sergeant who either was there or knew someone that was, but they are no longer around to verify the tale. It’s kind of amusing when you hear the same story for the umpteenth time that was supposed to have happened in an entirely different part of the world than the last three times you heard it.

James Loewen found that it was too hard to document the signs, so he decided to document towns that were “white by choice”. Not too difficult, Oregon was a State that was “white by choice”. There was an actual Constitutional ban on bringing blacks into Oregon until 1926. But it was not the same thing as the “Sundown Sign”. Nor is it particularly noteworthy.

There is racism in our past? Do tell.

There were also supposed to be signs about “Dogs and Sailors” in Norfolk (another Urban Legend) and the famous (or infamous) “Dogs and Chinese Not Allowed” in the Bund in Shanghai in the 1930’s. (which also has never been proven one way or the other)

That’s another thing that these all have in common, they existed in the 1920s and 1930s. Very few, if any can be convincingly documented after the 1960s. I know George Brosi says he saw such a sign in rural Kentucky in the 1990s, but I find it odd that he didn’t think it sufficiently noteworthy to take a picture of it, even after it stayed there for a year.

He says that blacks were systematically excluded from scores of counties throughout the U.S.. Well Duh!

Maybe the lynching had something to do with it? But he still doesn’t seem to be able to produce a sign.

“I would ask a librarian, ‘Do you have any photos of the sundown sign?’ ” he recalls. “And a typical reply would be, ‘Why on earth would we keep that ?’ “

But they did keep pictures of lynchings? There is no shortage of lynching pictures with dour faced white men and women gathered beneath the body of a hanging black man. Sometimes there were even children in the picture. But no one took or kept a picture of a “sundown” sign because it was too uncomfortable?

Sorry, I detect the strong odor of BS here.

But it’s a good story for the Post to publish. Just in case some White people had forgotten how awful they are and how much they owe Blacks.

That’s looking more and more like a debt that will always be owed. No matter how much is paid.