Why is the public not "suitably alarmed" about Global Warming?

Why?

Because they're better informed than the True Believers need them to be, as the lamentations of this particular True Believer show.

From the Weekly Standard: The More You Know, The Less You Care.

But, as Professor Sowell tells us (hat tip: Wendell Sawyer):


" The bigger problem is that this has long since become a crusade rather than an exercise in evidence or logic. Too many people are too committed to risk it all on a roll of the dice, which is what turning to empirical evidence is."


Perhaps the conference he discusses will get enough attention in the media to cause some attention being paid to the realities of "Global Warming".

And the Easter Bunny's on his way, too.........

Who said this?

"The United States cannot regain its competitive standing in the world by importing low wage workers from other countries. On the one hand, it engenders conditions this country cannot and should not tolerate...On the other hand, in the modern age a nation's wealth and prosperity is secured by high worker productivity and capital investment, not by the availability of low-wage labor."


Pat Buchanan?


Bill Buckley?


Jim Gilchrist?


Milton Friedman?


No.

It was Eugene McCarthy, in "A Colony of the World: The United States Today", pg 71.

(hat tip: Lee Cary)

Remembering William F. Buckley, Jr., 1925-2008

AP:

"'Mr. Buckley,' one non-fan wrote in 1967, 'you are the mouthpiece of that evil rabble that depends on fraud, perjury, dirty tricks, anything at all that suits their purposes. I would trust a snake before I would trust you or anybody you support.'

Responded Buckley: 'What would you do if I supported the snake?'"

The campus rape industry and the current condition of radical feminism

Heather MacDonald:


"It’s a lonely job, working the phones at a college rape crisis center. Day after day, you wait for the casualties to show up from the alleged campus rape epidemic—but no one calls.

Could this mean that the crisis is overblown?

No: it means, according to the campus sexual-assault industry, that the abuse of coeds is worse than anyone had ever imagined. It means that consultants and counselors need more funding to persuade student rape victims to break the silence of their suffering........

....None of this crisis response occurs, of course—because the crisis doesn’t exist."



Wait, there's more:


"The baby boomers who demanded the dismantling of all campus rules governing the relations between the sexes now sit in dean’s offices and student-counseling services. They cannot turn around and argue for reregulating sex, even on pragmatic grounds.

Instead, they have responded to the fallout of the college sexual revolution with bizarre and anachronistic legalism. Campuses have created a judicial infrastructure for responding to postcoital second thoughts more complex than that required to adjudicate maritime commerce claims in Renaissance Venice......

.....But the post-1960s university is nothing if not capacious. It has institutionalized every strand of adolescent-inspired rebellion familiar since student sit-in days. The campus rape industry may decry ubiquitous male predation, but a campus sex industry puts bureaucratic clout behind the message that students should have recreational sex at every opportunity."

"Modern feminists defined the right to be promiscuous as a cornerstone of female equality. Understandably, they now hesitate to acknowledge that sex is a more complicated force than was foreseen. Rather than recognizing that no-consequences sex may be a contradiction in terms, however, the campus rape industry claims that what it calls campus rape is about not sex but rather politics—the male desire to subordinate women."

Read the whole thing. The article gives us yet another great example of political correctness carried to absurd extremes.

How to dish out the dirt in politics

Mary Katherine Ham gives us the details, as illustrated by the New York Slimes.

Without a doubt.....

(hat tip: Dr. Sanity)

It's payback time at Duke

The maligned Duke lacrosse players may well get their day in court.

And Dook U will pay the price in more ways tha one.

Jon Ham at Right Angles has some detail, including several of the dumbest points ever made by so-called "journalists" at a press conference.

Regarding that wonderful Canadian health care system

......that Dave Ribar waxed enthusiastically about here, and was further discussed here.


Brian Balfour at Red Clay Citizen tells us more.



Noteworthy:

"Hmm, unsustainable increases in health care costs coupled with doctor shortages. How could these things happen in Canada's publicly-funded universal system? Those things would never happen here if Hillary or Obama get their way...right?"

Cuts in City's employment.

Mitch Johnson plans to cut 49 jobs from the city's employment ranks.

Unfortunately (for the time being), he gets to keep his.

Give thanks to Robbie Perkins and Zach Matheny, the Batman and Robin of the Greensboro city council.

Happy Birthday, Smokey

The great Smokey Robinson, born this day in 1940.

Scott Johnson tells us about his timelessness.

Well gee whiz! Somehow, our pals in the media and in the ranks of the True Believers somehow failed to tell us this!

I can't imagine why, except for the fact it blows a HUGE hole on a cherished talking point for their "scientific consensus" on "global warming" nonsense.

Pat Michaels:

"Guess what. Almost all the socioeconomic variables were important. We found the data were of highest quality in North America and that they were very contaminated in Africa and South America. Overall, we found that the socioeconomic biases 'likely add up to a net warming bias at the global level that may explain as much as half the observed land-based warming trend.'"

Imagine that!

A fundamental tenet of Class Warfare, as practiced by those of a certain political persuasion

It's used here in the context of social security, but it also applies to such issues as "tax cuts for the rich", health care/health insurance, "recession" drumbeating, American combat statistics, "global warming", race, "constitutional" rights, "torture, "wiretapping".......the list is too long to fully enumerate.




"When you have a choice, always pick the scarier of two numbers, to incite the maximum possible resentment in the voters you are addressing."

As discussed here.


Other gems of truth:

1. To incite resentment about the regressive social security tax, be sure to talk about tax percentages, not tax dollars;

BUT...

2. To incite resentment about income tax cuts, do the opposite: talk about tax dollars, not tax percentages.

Che, Obama, and JFK

"In 1963, John F. Kennedy was murdered in Texas by a fervent admirer of Cuban dictator Fidel Castro. In 2008, a large Cuban flag emblazoned with the image of Che Guevara, Castro’s brutal henchman, is prominently displayed in a Barack Obama campaign volunteer office in Houston.

Obama has been widely compared to JFK, most notably by the late president’s brother and daughter. President Kennedy, a stalwart anticommunist, despised Castro and his gang of totalitarian thugs. But when word broke last week that Obama’s supporters in Houston work under a banner glorifying Che, the campaign’s reaction was to brush it off as an issue involving volunteers, not the official campaign.

After two days of controversy, the campaign issued a statement calling the flag 'inappropriate' and saying its display 'does not reflect Senator Obama’s views.'

Would JFK have reacted so mildly?... That this sadistic thug’s face also adorns the office of a U.S. presidential candidate’s supporters is appalling and disgraceful. That the candidate couldn’t bring himself to say so is even worse."

-- Jeff Jacoby

Read the whole thing at the Patriot Post US.

Beware the October surrender

Farfetched?

Consider the current scenario, then ask yourself:

Why now?

Why Assad?

Why representatives from BOTH Dem contenders?

Regarding the latest Democrat iteration of "hope and change"

It turns out it's just the 21st century application of the McGovern abroad/Mondale at home approach that worked so well for them previously.

Mark Steyn on Obama

"Hero Worship" takes on new meaning in American politics.

Key points:

"On the other hand, if you’re running for president not as an unexceptional first-term senator with a thin resume but as the new Messiah, the new Kennedy, the new Gandhi, the new Martin Luther King, you can’t blame folks for leaping ahead to the next stage in the mythic narrative. Around the world, a second instant sub-genre has sprung up in which commentators speculate how long it will be before some deranged Christian-fundamentalist neo-Nazi gun-nut deprives America of its fleeting wisp of glory. Setting a new standard for fevered slavering Obama-assassination porn, Earl MacRae warned Canadians in the Ottawa Sun this week:


'To be black and catapulting towards the presidency on charm, intellect, and popularity is unacceptable to the racist paranoid and scary in America the beautiful… They do not want to hear that he is a better American than they are, these right-wing extremist fascists in the land of America who no doubt believe it’s God’s will Barack Obama not get to the White House, no method of deterrence out of bounds, in their zealotry to protect and perpetuate Roy Rogers, John Wayne, Mom's apple pie, and the cross of Jesus in every home. '"



"Barack Obama is an elevator Muzak dinner-theater reduction of all the glibbest hand-me-down myths in liberal iconography — which is probably why he’s a shoo-in."

Karlgaard: The Deeper Roots of Economic Anxiety

The U.S. economy is in better shape than the pundits, polls and press say it is.


Excerpt:

"If you and I face up to these facts and trends and likelihoods, the world will look scary but thrilling, and full of opportunity, too. If we cover our eyes or imagine that politicians can protect us from change, the world will look scary, period."

More bad news for the "Scientific Consensus" True Believers

It keeps getting worse for your little scheme, boys and girls!

Noteworthy:

"Dr. Baliunas' work with fellow Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics astronomer Willie Soon suggests global warming is more directly related to solar variability than to increased levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, an alternative view to what's been widely publicized in the mainstream media. "

Ah, what do they know, anyway?

They're obviously just some fringe scientist lackeys of Big Oil, who aren't peer reviewed, right?

(hat tip: Fred Gregory)

Economic News of the Day

Recession odds have fallen by 12 points on intrade.com over the last 4 weeks.

So what's really changed on the David Wray affair?

It appears to be nothing.... just the same old tired bullshit, different day.


What would you suggest we do from this point forward?

Recall?

Boycott the Wyndham, as Billy suggests?

Confront the Enablers and the power broker groups every chance we get?

Or just give up, admit we can't win, or just move out of our town, and let "business as usual" proceed apace, like the N&R, Melvin, Kitchen, Perkins, and most of the rest of the city council wants?

A Wall Street insider tells us the current reality of the Market

......and how the Dems and the Doom and Gloom crowd are talking down the market for their own agenda.

I get a kick out of how the so-called local "experts" on this subject think this isn't happening.

Advice to those folks:

Stop being so provincial on this subject. Get out of your own circle a little more often, and talk to some people who actually understand the dynamics of these things before you run your mouth.

Coming Soon To A Neighborhood Like Yours

Ooooops! There will be a slight revision in the "global warming" agenda

Ethanol is now "out" as the favored alternate fuel.

Or maybe we should just ignore all of this, just like we conveniently do on all those agenda counter-productive facts the Deniers keep pestering us about.

Excerpts:

"So, incredibly, when the hidden costs of conversion are included, greenhouse-gas emissions from corn ethanol over the next 30 years will be twice as high as from regular gasoline. In the long term, it will take 167 years before the reduction in carbon emissions from using ethanol 'pays back' the carbon released by land-use change. As they say, it's not easy being green."

Imagine that!

"Yet special blame also belongs to the environmentalists, who are engaged in a grand bait-and-switch. They stir up a panic about global warming, and Washington responds to the political incentives. Then those policies don't work and the greens immediately begin pushing a new substitute, whose outcomes and costs are equally uncertain. But somehow, that never seems to discredit the entire enterprise and taxpayers keep footing the subsidy bill. Our guess is that these new revelations will also be ignored. They're too embarrassing."

That's probably more accurate.

It's too difficult for that crowd to actually be intellectually and academically factual.

Absolute Truths

“You cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift.

You cannot help small men by tearing down big men.

You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong.

You cannot lift the wage-earner by pulling down the wage-payer.

You cannot help the poor man by destroying the rich.

You cannot keep out of trouble by spending more than your income.

You cannot further the brotherhood of man by inciting class hatred.

You cannot establish security on borrowed money.

You cannot build character and courage by taking away men’s initiative and independence.

You cannot help men permanently by doing for them what they could and should do for themselves.”

—William J. H. Boetcker



“If conservatism is not about conserving principles that originate in reality—a reality that comes from God and is made known to man through his reason—then what good is it?

A conservatism without the natural law is simply willful liberalism in a more respectable guise, moving more glacially than the Left’s transparent one, but essentially agreeing that man is the measure of all things and political disputes, no matter how obviously they bear upon the God-given nature of man, are to be resolved by power and man’s desires.

Both reason and bitter history should tell conservatives that sawing off the natural law leg of its stool makes the whole thing collapse. Without principles rooted in reality upon which to deliberate about the size of government proper to human beings, economic conservatism evaporates and foreign-policy conservatism turns hubristic.”

—George Neumayr


from the Patriot Post US

Reagarding the choices we face in this presidential election

"A Clinton or Obama victory would put all levers of power into the same hands. What would Democratic -party bosses do with that? How about statehood for Washington, D.C., which would provide two new Democratic votes in the Senate? How about appointing judges who regard the Constitution as clay, and using immigration policy to expand the Left’s electoral margins? These and other creative maneuvers could create an anti-conservative majority that would last a generation or more.

Most worrisome of all: Americans today are engaged in a conflict as serious as any we have ever fought. Romney and McCain get that. Perhaps Hillary Clinton does, too, though you wouldn’t know it from anything she’s said recently. But does Barack Obama? Or does he think it’s all a big misunderstanding, one that can be resolved through talk, appeasement, global anti-poverty programs and a sincere effort to make ourselves inoffensive to those sworn to destroy us?

Thinking hard about such questions over the months ahead would be not just alright; it would be commendable — and conservative."

Cliff May, at NRO

From Romney's exit speech

At CPAC, via Power Line:

"Soon, the face of liberalism in America will have a new name. Whether it is Barack or Hillary, the result would be the same if they were to win the Presidency. The opponents of American culture would push the throttle, devising new justifications for judges to depart from the constitution. Economic neophytes would layer heavier and heavier burdens on employers and families, slowing our economy and opening the way for foreign competition to further erode our lead.

Even though we face an uphill fight, I know that many in this room are fully behind my campaign.” You are with me all the way to the convention. Fight on, just like Ronald Reagan did in 1976. But there is an important difference from 1976: today… we are a nation at war.

And Barack and Hillary have made their intentions clear regarding Iraq and the war on terror. They would retreat and declare defeat. And the consequence of that would be devastating. It would mean attacks on America, launched from safe havens that make Afghanistan under the Taliban look like child’s play. About this, I have no doubt."

Romney is too kind. He did not mention that certain people would allow us to LOSE this war as long as it added agenda points to their worldview.

Will McCain say what needs to be said?

NRO:

"What McCain should do instead is to take the fight to the Democrats, explaining why he’s against Harry Reid’s defeatism, Hillary Clinton’s health-care plan, Nancy Pelosi’s obstructionism on intelligence gathering, Barack Obama’s tax increases, and even Dennis Kucinich’s Department of Peace.

Conservatives know that McCain can be a tough political combatant. They want to see him turn those skills on the Democrats. They’re tired of being on the defensive. Even McCain’s opponents in the CPAC crowd will have to applaud as he lays into the Democrats."



WSJ:

"John McCain needs conservatives more than conservatives need John McCain. Those conservatives who are old enough recall the words of the last Senator from Arizona who ran for our highest office. I'd rather be right than president, said Barry Goldwater in 1964, to the wild cheers of his supporters. Conservative principles are timeless, and will outlast any politician.

Mr. McCain is standing on a precipice. By saying the right things, he could bring a lot of conservatives into his camp. But if he does not, he could lose enough of them to assure a Democratic victory in November."

Romney's out

It's up to you, Senator McCain.

Talk to us. Or not.

Your choice.

War on the middle class?

Oh please......Give me a break!

The Doom and Gloom scenario that those of a certain political/social/economic agenda want you to believe in is attaining the same myth status as the "scientific consensus" on "anthropogenic global warming" has.

In other words, if you tell a big enough lie enough times, it starts gaining acceptance.

Hillary and Obama "transcend gender and race"?

Only if you're in denial.

Excerpts:

"We keep hearing that Obama's candidacy isn't about race and Clinton's isn't about gender. But clearly this presidential campaign season is about both. It is also about age and religion, in the cases of McCain and Romney, respectively."

"Some may be able to justify all these biases as recompense for past inequalities, but we shouldn't be confused about why we vote a certain way.

Far from transcending race and gender, we have made them our political masters."

Also, I love this quote from Shelby Steele:

"There is this (white) need, this driving hunger, to somehow get this race thing resolved, to redeem the country, to get beyond it. ... That's (the) phenomenon...."

He neglected to include "Dem/Lefty/'Progressive'" before (white)......perhaps it's just a given, in light of certain political, social, and economic agendas that side of the equation is famous for promoting.

Let's see now: December factory orders up 2.3%, durable goods orders up 5%, orders for capital goods +11.3%

Looks like times are tough......for the Doom and Gloomers/Recession Drumbeaters.

Noteworthy:

"So where is the recession everybody is talking about? A recession requires at least 2 consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth. I remain convinced that we will see no negative growth quarters at all this year."

C'mon, gang! You can do better than this! Let's re-double your efforts to push the Dark Days meme on your readers and watchers!

After all, there will soon be a Dem presidential candidate to elect, and we can't have the people thinking that things aren't so bad after all, can we?

"You VILL haff health insurance, und you vill LIKE it!"

Hillary's latest on the universal health care front:

"Clinton has not always specified the enforcement measures she would embrace, but when pressed on ABC's 'This Week,' she said: 'I think there are a number of mechanisms' that are possible, including 'going after people's wages, automatic enrollment.'"

Over at PowerLine, John Hinderaker puts it into focus:


"There is an analogy between the compulsory aspects of the candidates' health care proposals and Social Security. A young man or woman would be crazy to participate in the Social Security system if he or she had any choice. If anyone saved 12.4% of his earnings over a lifetime, he would not only have far more money in retirement than Social Security can provide, it would, equally important, be his money, to invest and dispose of as he sees fit.

But the government needs young people's money to support their grandparents' retirements, so Social Security is forced upon them. The same thing, in essence, will happen with health care if any comprehensive 'reform' plan is adopted."

A comprehensive list of all things "global warming"

Just in time to give to your favorite valentine acolyte of the Goracle, a handy list of links you can use to deflect those nasty facts from those evil Deniers!

Here's one of my favorites:

"As evidence mounts of possible global warming and overfishing, there may be a flip side to the dire news: an abundance of calamari."

Better Italian restaurants must be ecstatic to know that a favorite menu appetizer will still be in good supply.

These people SHALL NOT prevail

Reflections on the bombing of the Baghdad pet market.

Read the whole thing.

Related:

Read the babble, dribble, drool, and spew from some Usual Suspects in support of the murder/suicide bombing caused by some cowards masquerading as the Religion of Peace terrorists.

"You want carrot sticks with that soy burger?"

Here's a possible future scenario under "government health care".

Does anyone really doubt that something like this will not take place if the incessant drumbeat of government provided health care joins forces with the Food Police?

More celebrity White House endorsements

Thomas Sowell's new book discusses economic fallacies

There's a lot of fiction that gets passed off as authoritative on economics in the media and the blahgosphere these days.

Sowell's Economic Facts and Fallacies sets some of them straight.

Excerpts:

Q: "Are the subprime credit crisis and the stock market’s swoon and the dollar’s drop in value symptoms of a deeper, larger, broader problem?"

A: "Well, no, they are simply the problems that they are. The government has brought on the housing problem, partly by these very low interest rates, which encouraged many people to go way out on a limb. They’ve brought it on by highly restrictive building policies, which have caused housing prices to skyrocket artificially.

And they’ve brought it on by the Community Reinvestment Act, which presumes that politicians are better able to tell investors where to put their money than the investors themselves are. When you put all that together, you get something like what you have."

Q: "What’s an example of a fallacy from your book?"

A:" One is the income gap between rich and poor. It’s maddening to me to keep hearing how the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer, and so on. The fundamental difference is the difference between talking about abstract statistical categories and talking about flesh-and-blood human beings.

Since the book came out, for example, there’s been a study released by the Treasury Department based on income tax returns. There, they are talking about following the same human beings over a span of years, which is wholly different from following income brackets over a span of years, because in all the brackets more than half the people change in the course of a decade. So what happens to a bracket is an abstract question; what happens to the flesh-and-blood human beings is different.

For example, for the flesh-and-blood people who were in the bottom 20 percent of taxpayers in income in 1996, their average increase of income over the next decade was 91 percent -- so they almost doubled their incomes. Meanwhile, for the people in the top 1 percent -- presumably the rich who are getting richer -- their average income declined 26 percent.

That's diametrically the opposite from what we’re hearing from nearly every newspaper and practically every political platform.

But of course it’s also true that if you look at the income tax brackets, the distance of the top bracket from the lowest bracket has increased. One reason is that the very lowest bracket is zero, so it can’t go any lower. So as you pay people more and more money and as the economy grows and skills become more sophisticated, obviously the ratio from the top and the bottom is going to increase."

And this.......

"There are three questions that I think would destroy the left if people could ask them: 'What are the facts? What are the consequences of what you are going to do?'

And 'What is the trade-off?'

People talk as if you can just save the people whose homes are at risk, and that’s it. Well, if that was the case, why not save them? But at what price? We could ratify the Kyoto Treaty, but the question is 'At what price and what benefits would there be to offset that price?'

That’s the question that the politicians and the ideologues don’t want to ask. They don’t want to compare. They don’t want to weigh one thing against the other."

That's perfectly understandable.

If some politicians were forced to compare, they wouldn't be able to pander the way they do.

Regarding the efficacy of the Canadian health care system

In comments on a recent Noteworthy post concerning problems with the Canadian single payer health system, Dave Ribar suggested that our Canadian neighbors just might enjoy a better system (with lower infant mortality rate being one measure) than we do. You can read the comments made by Dave, myself, and Joe Guarino.

Here is some earlier research, and a number of linked footnotes which give additional substance in favor of the U.S. system.

As you can see in the original thread's comments, Dave dismissed the value of "anecdotes" in favor of statistics. Here's some statistics in support of "anecdotes".

"According to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (an international organization of 30 member nations), in 2001, 63 percent of Americans reported a waiting time of one month or less for elective surgery, compared to 37 percent of Canadians. 32 percent of Americans waited 1-3 months for elective surgery compared to 36 percent of Canadians. Only five percent of Americans reported waits of four months or more for such procedures, compared to 27 percent of Canadians.

In September 2004, an article by Canadian researchers appearing in Circulation: Journal of the American Heart Association reported that Canadian heart attack patients run a 17 percent greater risk of dying than their U.S. counterparts. The researchers concluded that the reason for higher Canadian mortality following heart attacks lay in the difference between the way the Canadian and U.S. health systems are organized."

The conclusion of the article sums it up nicely:

"Advocates of a Canadian system do tout this benefit: Patients pay nothing for services. But this this accurate? Only for those patients who aren't Canadian taxpayers. Twenty-two percent of all of Canada's tax revenues go to pay for Canada's health care system.

That's a lot of money for Canadian citizens to spend for a service they can't be sure they'll get."

On the other hand, I suppose things could have magically turned 180 degrees around in Canada in the 3 plus years since the article was written, but I rather doubt that the "exemplary" Canadian system has improved that much in such a short time

"Victimitis" on the Immigration front

"If the mainstream media are to be believed (and that’s a big 'if'), the problem in the ongoing immigration debate is not lawbreakers; it’s the laws themselves. The New York Times recently ran a story on Arkansas’ newly passed Proposition 300, a law that prevents illegal aliens from receiving in-state tuition and state financial assistance to attend college.

Rather than highlight the criminality of illegal immigration itself or on the economic impact of funding services for illegal aliens, The Times, in its hallmark objective journalistic fashion, mentions these only briefly and then focuses on the plight of young men and women suddenly 'denied' help in obtaining a college education. Noting the 'disappoint[ment of] many college-aged Mexican-Americans' (we include this term loosely), The Times cites one such student who expressed dismay that many people she grew up with 'now have no future,' and 'their shot at the American dream is gone.'

In reality, the American dream is alive and well. What’s nearly gone is the once commonplace understanding that our laws are not of the pick-and-choose salad-bar variety, and that illegal aliens have no sacred right to immunity.

If The Times’ article is slanted, the Associated Press had the gall to blame an infant’s death on immigration laws. In a 'pull-at-your-heartstrings' attempt to demonize supporters of legitimate immigration laws, the AP recently faulted Oklahoma’s House Bill 1804 (the Oklahoma Taxpayer and Citizen Protection Act of 2007) for the death of the two-month-old child of illegal aliens. Fearing deportation, the child’s parents delayed seeking medical care for their sick child for ten days. When they finally brought him to a clinic, it was too late.

The AP reports, 'A ruptured intestine that might have been treatable instead killed the U.S.-born infant, making him a poster child for opponents of House Bill 1804 months before it was enacted.' Notwithstanding that the law was not yet in effect, and despite the fact that it includes an exception for emergency medical care, the AP chose to blame the bill for the infant’s death, citing bill descriptions ranging from 'xenophobic' to—you guessed it—'Nazi'-like.

The truth is that the poor boy was not denied care by the system but by his own parents. Yet, in the AP’s list of priorities, the truth apparently ranks far below partisan demagoguery."

From the Patriot Post US

Somehow, I missed this story

Obviously, lots of Lame Stream and blahgosphere folks din't think it was worth any attention.

How wrong they are.....

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120182537976533691.html


Noteworthy:

"...the dictator admitted that he intended to resume those programs as soon as he possibly could."


"The key point is Saddam's admission that an Iraqi WMD program remained a threat so long as Saddam remained in power.

Opponents of the war argue that none of this matters because Saddam and his ambitions were being "contained" by U.N. sanctions.

Hardly. "


"...when he asked Saddam about his use of chemical weapons against Kurdish civilians, the dictator acknowledged that he had given the orders personally and explained himself in a word: 'Necessary.'

The same still goes for getting rid of Saddam."


The political expediency for those of a particular worldview keeping such information under wraps in this election year?

Also "necessary".