Category: Politics

A few months ago, Ryan of the Dead Parrot Society debunked the claim that certain photographs of an execution on Haifa Street, in Baghdad, were taken from close range. Ryan is the online producer for a Washington State newspaper; he has experience with news photography and the ability to ask real photographers questions. So he did. He found out that the photos in question were almost certainly taken from a distance.

This hasn’t stopped Powerline and Michelle Malkin from continuing to perpetuate the myth that the photographers were standing right next to the execution.

That issue seems, at first, as if it’s tangential to the bigger question of cooperation — but it’s not really. Consider: if I say “the photographer got a picture of the execution from a block away, which proves that the terrorists knew the photographer was there,” does that sound reasonable? Not so much. That’s very different than saying “the terrorists were right next to the photographers, so the terrorists must have had a reason to leave the photographers alone.”

Mitt Romney still isn’t going to be the Republican Presidential nominee in 2008. I know he’s the trendy choice, but barring a significant shift in the party, he doesn’t stand a chance of getting past the primaries. He’s got to tack too far to the left in order to effectively govern in Massachusetts, and that’s

On the way into work this morning, I heard a commercial from Mitt about stem cell research. This is a very topical issue in Massachusetts right now; our House and Senate just passed bills concerning this research which explicitly allow both embryonic stem cell research and something called “somatic cell nuclear transfer.”

Romney came out against the latter, but — in the radio ad — explicitly states his support for embryonic stem cell research. This is probably necessary for him from a political standpoint; he can’t afford to get too far away from the mainstream of Massachusetts politics, and the mainstream is in favor of the entire bill. If he wrote off embryonic stem cell research entirely, the reaction would be fairly intense, and you can’t run for President from a state that dislikes you. Let alone govern effectively.

On the other hand, it’s going to kill him on the national scene. This is a hot ticket issue for people who vote in the primaries. It won’t affect him in New Hampshire or Iowa, but it’ll be a big deal for Super Tuesday. In 2000, Bush didn’t stomp McCain until Super Tuesday, in the south; I’d predict the same kind of dynamic here.

Part of a government! Seriously, it’s a good start.

Jesse Jackson wants Terry Schiavo kept alive. I must confess a certain bleak curiosity; will those on the left who excoriated Ralph Nader hold Jesse to the same standard?

Still no government.

This struck me as just a stupid loudmouth.

This made me relieved that the people getting violent are ineffectual.

This has me worried. I’m not sure why; perhaps it’s that the third time is a charm, or perhaps it’s that Hal Turner has an audience. Maybe it’s because Jeb Bush nearly sent armed men in. Hopefully it’s just a publicity stunt to boost Turner’s ratings; hopefully none of his listeners take it as an indication that they should join him.

James Lileks thinks we should keep Terri alive because Christopher Pike was a hero. That has nothing to do with the above, but I’ve spent all week staring at it while I try to avoid Schiavo posts. Now that I’ve finally made one, I figured I’d shoehorn it in.

Mostly, at this point, I feel sorry for her parents. People keep lying to them. It sucks.

Answer: not. The big snag in forming an Iraqi government is, as expected, whether or not Kirkuk winds up in Kurdish hands or not. Add to this the Kurdish insistence on maintaining their own separate militia, and what you’ve basically got is a demand for functional independence plus a big chunk of the Iraq oil reserves.

It is, to say the least, difficult for the Shiite majority to agree. Turkey is still very edgy about Kurdish independence. I don’t know how this gets resolved, short of the Kurds compromising.

It is perhaps relevant that the current leader of Iraq, Allawi, has absolutely no incentive at all to resolve this crisis. The moment a new government is formed, he’s out in the cold. Well, he’s leader of the minority bloc — but if he was in any position to be part of a coalition government, he’d already have done so, and the Kurds wouldn’t be a problem.

Iraq has a government. Or not.

My friend Jere pointed out, quite accurately, that the question isn’t really “what did the kid in Kentucky write about?” The question is “when did we start arresting people for writing stories, no matter how disturbed?” Or, perhaps, “when did we stop trusting parents to raise kids and deal with problem situations?”

It’s probably relevant that the biggest policy victory (pending) for the Democrats over the last few years has been Social Security, on which issue they’re coming down on the side of the government protecting people. We really like being protected these days.

Remember the kid in Kentucky who got in trouble for writing a story about zombies taking over his high school? It’s more complicated than he claimed. According to local police, there weren’t any zombies in the stories, and there’s more to the case against him than just some fiction.

I did a little poking around to see if I could find anything out about this “No Limited Soldiers” gang. The only sign of it on Google is, um, a Command and Conquer clan. Their page seems to be down. I found their home page on archive.org, and whois data shows that the domain is registered to someone in the Netherlands, so probably no connection there.

In defense of something or other, the kid’s teachers still look like they’re overly nervous. They’re on record saying that “they had not assigned such a story or talked to him about it — and had they seen it, they would have been obligated to report him to authorities.” Zombies are scary. Overreaction to zombies makes me wonder if the police didn’t overreact to something else.

Or, hey, the kid could be a junior whacko who was thinking seriously about armed revolt. Hard to tell at this point.