Category: The Dish

The brutal Islamist war on gay people is proceeding apace in Iraq:

Graphic photos obtained from Baghdad sources too frightened to identify themselves as having known a gay man, and seen by the Observer, show other gay Iraqis who have been executed. One shows two men, suspected of having a relationship, blindfolded with their hands tied behind their backs – guns at the ready behind their heads – awaiting execution. Another picture captured on a mobile phone shows a gay man being beaten to death. Yet another shows a corpse being dragged through the streets after his execution.

One photograph is of the mutilated, burnt body of 38-year-old Karar Oda from Sadr City. He was kidnapped by the Badr Brigade in mid-June. They work with the Ministry of Interior and are the informal armed wing of the Supreme Council of Islamic Revolution in Iraq, who make up the largest Shia bloc in the Iraq parliament. Oda’s family were given an arrest warrant signed by the Ministry of Interior which said their son deserved to be arrested and killed for immorality as a homosexual. His body was found ten days later.

We liberated a country for this?

New Delhi, India, 4 pm. Yep, that’s a peacock.

A reader writes on some interesting historical parallels to the faith-based leader-cult that best describes Hugh Hewitt’s political-theological position:

It might not be far from the truth to see in Hugh and his ilk the same phenomenon that Donald Rumsfeld once characterized as dead-enders. But there’s another aspect of his thinking that troubles me very deeply.

Back in the late 19th century there were a group of thinkers centered in Middle Europe who called themselves "Caesarists" – they held that the most promising social organization was a highly structured, authoritarian society led by a charismatic leader with at least a measure of religious attributes (by some formulations, this leader should be simultaneously a secular and a religious leader, which of course fit the Julian concept to a T). Western style democracy, they argued, was lazy and weak (actually they regularly used the German word "faul" which means either lazy or rotten, a carefully calculated ambiguity), and only the Caesarian variant could inspire men to fulfill their great potential.

Many intellectual historians see in the Caesarists the seeds of the fascist movements of the 1920’s, and that’s true, but one could just as easily link them to the Napoleon-worshippers in France, other authoritarian strains of conservatism, and even to Leninist notions of democratic centralism. They were defined by a contempt for liberal democracy, and consequently they provided amunition to all of liberalism’s enemies.

The Bush campaigns in 2000 and 2004 were different from prior election campaigns I have witnessed in that there was a carefully maintained aura of this "Caesarism" about them (always on the fringes, always deniable, but nevertheless there).  And now that Bush’s popular support collapses through floor after floor, we find his hardcore support, say a quarter of the voting population, heavily populated by this "faith" Caesarian contingent.

Liberal society can and should allow free space for such conceptualizations and movements, but it must also recognize the threat that they present to basic democratic concepts. We are living those threats right now. The mainstream media and our punditry have failed to engage these issues in a serious way. Your book, when it is out, will perhaps make an important start.

Wikiality? Stephen Colbert discusses Wikipedia. Yes, it has a liberal bias.

Britain’s top scientist urges emergency investment in non-carbon energy technology. I’m reluctant to see government take the major role in this. The model should be the HIV crisis. Governments should fund basic research, but should merely spur the private sector to invest in energy solutions. The on indispensable element of this is a gradual but serious increase in gas taxes in America.

That seems to be the only question left for Joe Lieberman.

"We have a good president. I pray for him. Sometimes I’d like to pull down his britches and switch him, but I still love him," – congressman Ralph Hall of Texas.

Some expert opinions on this:

I am not a ballistics expert but what was said on the video makes sense, even if you account for the differences in chokes, etc. The presenter’s spin was that there was a "cover-up" for some nefarious reason. Most likely the reason was embarrassment rather than a cover-up, but he has a point that Cheney took advantage of his position to make sure that the least nasty report would come out. He shot Mr. Whittingon due to stupidity and lack of common sense, but that does not make him a felon. I have been the physician for the US Shooting team and am still a writer for Shotgun Sports Magazine so I do have some practical experience. The kind of penetration noted in the police and medical reports does indicate a closer shot.

Another hunter weighs in:

Anyone experienced shotgunner/hunter could see that the story was weird from the beginning. The original story said Whittington was hit by as many as 250 pellets. A 28 gauge only has 250 pellets (a 12 gauge has 450 by comparison). It is inconceivable that at thirty yards he could had been hit by more than a third or fourth of the pellets. Second, when I accidentally shot a hunting guide at about 12-15 yards, my victim only had deep skin penetration of the pellets, almost all removable by tweezers and scalpels. Whittington was shot at very close range to have the level of penetration that was reported.

Here’s the one piece of data that might affect this assessment:

"One thing to remember: the only thing that is consistent about shotguns is that very few things are consistent. Identical guns with the same degree of choke and using the same shell may not pattern the same. The same load between various brands of shells can pattern differently. Patterns will change when changing from  hard to soft shot. Patterns can change when anything in the shell changes such as different wads, powders or primers. What I am trying to get across is that when you change anything such as brands, shot size, or components you will need to check the pattern as it could have changed, sometimes by an extreme amount."

Another reader argues that we cannot know from the data we have:

I’m no fan of Cheney and I think the responsibility for what happened rests squarely on his shoulders, but I think it is reasonable to believe that he shot Whittington at 30 yards.
It is also reasonable to think that he shot him at half that range, too. But I don’t think there is any way to establish this given the variables and the unknowns.

Just fleshing this out. I feel bad giving Jones any air now I know who he is. But I see no problem with hashing this out some more.

Soaring debt, massive expansion of federal entitlements, and airbrushing hard, fiscal reality:

The federal government keeps two sets of books.
The set the government promotes to the public has a healthier bottom line: a $318 billion deficit in 2005.
The set the government doesn’t talk about is the audited financial statement produced by the government’s accountants following standard accounting rules. It reports a more ominous financial picture: a $760 billion deficit for 2005. If Social Security and Medicare were included ‚Äî as the board that sets accounting rules is considering ‚Äî the federal deficit would have been $3.5 trillion.

We should definitely include Medicare and Social Security in the numbers. The Bush administration isn’t the only administration to have fiddled with fiscal numbers. But the crisis is growing; and their obliviousness is unnerving. This isn’t conservatism. It’s big government recklessness. It needs to be stopped.

How was it that TMZ.com scooped the Los Angeles Times on the Gibson story? Bill Powers wants to know.