Frum and Perle to Bush: “Start More Wars!”. Richard Perle and David Frum have authored a new book, chal­leng­ing the Bush Admin­is­tra­tion to start more wars in order to win the war on ter­ror. Accord­ing to today’s Daily Tele­graph of Lon­don, within the book Pres­i­dent Bush was sent… [LewRockwell.com Blog]

CA: Gun case declared a mis­trial due to hung jury. A mis­trial was declared Tues­day after jurors dead­locked over whether the design of a Beretta pis­tol caused the acci­den­tal shoot­ing death of a Berke­ley teenager in 1994.

It was the sec­ond time Alameda County jurors pon­dered the cir­cum­stances that ended with Kenzo Dix shot dead by a 14-year-old friend show­ing off a gun he thought was unloaded.

The first civil trial ended with jurors exon­er­at­ing the Beretta gun com­pany. Their ver­dict was over­turned by an appel­late court that ruled a juror con­vinced par­ents are respon­si­ble for weapons in their homes had bul­lied other jurors and affected the out­come. [FirearmNews.com]

It’s dis­gust­ing, but hardly sur­pris­ing, that a ver­dict was over­turned because one of the jurors actu­ally had the gall to believe in per­sonal respon­si­bil­ity and con­vince other jurors of the same. I won­der how that per­son even got on a jury in the first place? The lawyers must not have been very care­ful about exclud­ing respon­si­ble peo­ple.

Polit­i­cal Lib­erty in Iraq. Demon­strat­ing for Sad­dam is right out, as this Iraqi teenager pro­filed in Slate learned. He and some school bud­dies were dragged out of school by nearly a hun­dred sol­diers and taken into cus­tody for allegedly attend­ing a pro-Saddam rally back shortly after his régime fell. An excerpt:bq. “They [the Amer­i­can sol­diers] are civil in a way,” Ibrahim said. “They are afraid of the sit­u­a­tion here, and that’s why they behave badly.” But he is not intim­i­dated by them. His fam­ily has seen plenty of Amer­i­can injus­tice. His father (some­thing to do with the for­mer gov­ern­ment, though exactly what Ibrahim wouldn’t say) has been detained three times, his uncle twice. His cousin was shot in the leg at an Amer­i­can check­point when he didn’t under­stand what the sol­dier was shout­ing. His grand­mother had three and a half kilos of gold and an heir­loom dia­mond neck­lace taken dur­ing a night­time raid on her house. All run-of-the-mill, unver­i­fi­able sto­ries of the kind I have heard many times.
…
The Amer­i­cans ques­tioned Ibrahim and the oth­ers and deter­mined that they were just school­boys protest­ing; there had been no par­tic­u­lar resis­tance involvement.

“I would have pre­ferred not to have done it,” said Lt. Col. Quin­tas, while acknowl­edg­ing that the oper­a­tion at the school had been under­taken on his ini­tia­tive, “But they need to under­stand that they are not allowed to do this and that there are consequences.”

And yes, I saw the part where the kid seems to admire Hitler. [Hit & Run]

The Iraqi teenager and his friends sound very much like teenagers in Amer­i­can pub­lic schools, right down to the fond­ness for Hitler.

Col­lo­rary to Ogden’s Law. “Those most rabid about war are the least inclined to go.” [LewRockwell.com Blog]

MONTY PYTHON TAKES OVER. I do real­ize that there might be a seri­ous point behind this — and I would be pre­pared to view it much more seri­ously if this war were being run by more intel­li­gent peo­ple with a slightly greater grasp of the oper­a­tive prin­ci­ples — but this runs the seri­ous risk of head­ing irre­triev­ably into Monty Python territory:

The FBI is warn­ing police nation­wide to be alert for peo­ple car­ry­ing almanacs, cau­tion­ing that the pop­u­lar ref­er­ence books cov­er­ing every­thing from abbre­vi­a­tions to… [The Light of Rea­son]

Great, now we’ll have all the Cru­saders rant­ing about how Poor Richard is a ter­ror­ist sympathizer.

Apple and Pepsi to Give Away 100 Mil­lion Free Songs. Apple

MORAL BULLIES, PART I: YOU SPEAK OF THE “COALITION OF THE PISSY”? VERY WELL THEN. I PISS ON YOU.. I have a con­fes­sion to make. On the day of Sad­dam Hussein’s cap­ture, I posted only a short entry. I was very busy with work, but promised to return with fur­ther thoughts very soon. But I haven’t done so until now. This is why.

I am embar­rassed to admit this, but in the name of full dis­clo­sure, I shall force myself to do so. I was cowed, over­awed, and struck dumb with aston­ish­ment at the sheer breadth, sub­tlety, nuance, com­plex­ity, and over­whelm­ing sophis­ti­ca­tion of the charges… [The Light of Rea­son]

bq. I want to state one thing very clearly and unmis­tak­ably for the ben­e­fit of any war­blog­gers who might read this — par­tic­u­larly those war­blog­gers and other hawks who strut their self-announced moral supe­ri­or­ity and con­stantly shove it in the face of every­one else, and who act as if any dis­agree­ment with their his­tor­i­cally igno­rant views of the world con­sti­tutes some sort of trea­son. You are the ene­mies of Amer­ica — just as you are the ene­mies of thought, of his­tory, of ideas, of any con­cep­tion of what gen­uine lib­erty means, and how it is to be achieved.

You are a dis­grace to this once-great nation, and if you have your way, this nation will fol­low many oth­ers on the route of total self-destruction in a con­fla­gra­tion of mil­i­tary might strewn pur­pose­lessly and mind­lessly around the globe, while an increas­ingly author­i­tar­ian gov­ern­ment destroys what remains of free­dom here in the United States. And I also want to make it clear that there are many of us who are not at all cowed by your moral blus­ter­ing. Many of us see it exactly for what it is: the phony pos­tur­ing of a cow­ard who relies on intim­i­da­tion in place of argu­ment, who feels that shout­ing mind­less slo­gans will silence any oppos­ing view­points, no mat­ter how well-reasoned, and who counts on the reluc­tance or unwill­ing­ness of his oppo­nents to stand up to the taunts of an obvi­ously igno­rant bully.

As your hol­low and offen­sive tac­tics increas­ingly reveal them­selves to be almost entirely devoid of thought, of any kind of his­tor­i­cal ground­ing, and of any basis in prin­ci­ple, I think more and more peo­ple will call your bluff — and finally shame you into silence. You are anti-American in every impor­tant sense: you have no under­stand­ing of indi­vid­ual free­dom or how it is main­tained, you have no appre­ci­a­tion of the dynam­ics of for­eign affairs, and you have no grasp of how ideas or a cul­ture of free­dom are spread.

Baby Steps to PATRIOT II. Com­menters in a thread below noted that, while media lenses were trained on the search for Saddam’s beard lice of mass destruc­tion, one more ele­ment of PATRIOT II—an expan­sion of the def­i­n­i­tion of “finan­cial institutions”—was passed in the form of a rider to an Intel­li­gence Autho­riza­tion Act. [Hit & Run]

I had pre­dicted this back in Feb­ru­ary. It would have been nice to be wrong, though.

ME…JUST…SO…CONFUSED. What can you say? Oops. Sorry. Never mind. Whatever:

TONY Blair is fac­ing severe embar­rass­ment after the US offi­cial run­ning Iraq dis­missed his claims that “mas­sive evi­dence” of weapons pro­grammes had been found in the coun­try as a “red herring”.

Paul Bre­mer, head of the Coali­tion Pro­vi­sional Author­ity, has recorded an inter­view for broad­cast this morn­ing, in which he was unaware the claims were from the Prime Min­is­ter, when he described them as unfounded and the work of… [The Light of Rea­son]

I’m con­tin­u­ally amazed by what bad liars the Cru­saders are. They seem to be totally unable to keep their sto­ries straight.

This is actu­ally a good thing in a way. By being such incred­i­bly obvi­ous liars, they make it very easy for any­one who doesn’t want to be fooled to tell what’s really going on.

DEAN’S MISTAKE. Fol­low­ing up on my post yes­ter­day about Howard Dean’s com­ments con­cern­ing bin Laden, I received the fol­low­ing in an email from NewsMax.com a short while ago:

News­Max Report Prompts Dean-Bin Laden Retraction

Demo­c­ra­tic pres­i­den­tial front-runner Howard Dean was forced to retract com­ments yes­ter­day where he warned against pre­judg­ing the guilt of 9/11 ter­ror mas­ter­mind Osama bin Laden, prompted by NewsMax.com’s cov­er­age of the story.

“As an Amer­i­can, I want to make sure he gets… [The Light of Rea­son]

It’s not exactly sur­pris­ing that Dean would decide to reject the prin­ci­ples of jury trial and pre­sump­tion of innocence–he is, after all, a politi­cian. I think he actu­ally did more harm to his can­di­dacy than Arthur Sil­bur seems too, though. Dean is run­ning as an “out­sider,” and his only chance of win­ning is if he actu­ally lives up to that. By act­ing like a typ­i­cal polit­i­can (“if you don’t like my prin­ci­ples, I have oth­ers”), he has shown him­self to be just another anti-American “insider.” Why should any­one vote for him over Bush if he has just as much con­tempt for Amer­ica as Bush?