OpinionJournal - We Need More People

So says Mary Ann Glendon, Learned Hand Professor of Law at Harvard University. But she is totally incorrect.

Her principal assumption is that a decline in birth rates, and the graying of America, are permanent and irreversible. Inferring permanence from a temporary, but long-lived trend is an elementary scholarly mistake, and I am surprised at Prof. Glendon for making it. More likely, she resents being cheated out of a grant when she published a paper critical of anti-immigration sentiment, only to have an environmental foundation renege on a promise it had made to her.

True enough, many of the most radical environmentalists actually believe--incorrectly--that the only way to save the environment is to reduce the country's population, and drastically so. But Prof. Glendon is simply wrong to suggest, as she does, that the American people are taking that advice.

In the Election of 2004, we heard that Bush carried twenty-five of the twenty-six States having the highest fertility among "majority group" women--while John Kerry carried the fifteen States, plust the District of Columbia, that were dead last in this ranking. Now that implies a corollary: that conservatives are having more of the children. Even a liberal demographer has ruefully concluded that the liberals are going to lose elections in the future because they foolishly aborted away their electorate, while the conservatives continue to breed theirs. (Frequent readers will recall that I predicted a shooting war between our conservatives and those of Mexico and the Middle East.)

The point is that we do not need more people. We need merely to wait for the next generation of adults, reared in large families and with a large-family mindset, to step forward and assume their adult responsibilities.

And here is the danger that Prof. Glendon ignores: that the admission of up to 100 million Mexicans over the next twenty years represents the last best hope of liberals to win elections in America anymore. Prof. Glendon did call this straight-up: that a typical new immigrant is drafted into the latest victims' army of people demanding entitlements, reparations, and God knows what else from those of us who are Americans of the fourth or higher-order generations. The Democratic Party clearly understands this. The Republicans do not. All they understand is that they don't want to pay a high enough wage.

But not to miss the larger point: We don't need more people. We just need to roll up our sleeves, hire out our middle-school-age and high-school-age sons to mow our neighbors' lawns as they did in my day, stop going to trendy Los Angeles restaurants where a once-popular entertainer could get a rise out of the kitchen staff by shouting, "Immigracion!" (and probably still could), and support the efforts of the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps as they quit waiting for the government to fence off our border, and do it themselves.

Minutemen Begin Building Border Fence

NewsMax.com tells us that the project to build a fence along private property lines of ranches abutting the Mexican border has begun. These guys are clearly serious. And as I've said before: it's a good design, and the government can't stop a private rancher from securing his own property as he sees fit.

Meanwhile, Representative Jim Sensenbrenner, who has been named to head the House Conference delegation, has already said that he will never accept "pathways to citizenship" like that in the Senate bill.

Frank Rich: Dump Hillary Clinton for Al Gore

From NewsMax.com.

Bring it on, Frankie. Keep it up. I'd love to see Al ("HE BETRAYED THIS COUNTRY! HE! PLAYED! ON! OUR! FEARS!") Gore running for President a second time. This time, we'll shellack him so thoroughly that he'll wish he never left Middle Tennessee.

OpinionJournal - Is Cannon Fodder?

Frankly, I hope he is.

The Cannon at issue here is Representative Chris Cannon (RINO-UT). Not only has he been a pro-immigrant man all the way down the line (he even praised Utah's disastrous decision to grant driver's licenses to holders of Mexican matriculas consulares), but he has also earned a nasty reputation for corruption and backbiting against conservative Republicans. Thus the conservative wing in Utah has been wanting to knock him off his high horse--and out of the House--for years. And now they just might do it.

And The Wall $treet Journal is unhappy about that--because they have never understood the need for a secure border. I quote:

When John McCain talks about securing the border first, you know the politics of the debate are shifting. That means supporters of a rational approach that goes beyond mere fence-building and enforcement have to be realistic about what is possible this year--especially should Rep. Cannon lose.

For "rational approach," read "let them in and let them vote." Sorry, but I can't accept that. Not so long as I know that the real intent of illegal aliens is to re-make the country their way, not mine. Again I quote:

So far, the White House and Republican National Committee are behind the curve. Last Friday, the RNC circulated a memo by Matthew Dowd, a strategist who worked on both of President Bush's two campaigns. "The comprehensive approach that emphasizes both security and compassion is unifying, not polarizing. It is supported by Republicans, independents and Democrats," the memo said. "Voters don't consider granting legal status to those already here amnesty."

That may be true,...

No, it isn't. That statement is, at best, a colossal misunderstanding of where voters actually stand--and at worst, a bald-faced piece of desinformatsiya. Either way, this is worthy of the Fishwrap Axis--what Rush Limbaugh calls the Drive-by Media. It is not worthy of The Wall Street Journal.

And at last, I quote:

The longer the stalemate continues, the more both President Bush and the GOP Congress may eventually view what Rep. Pence calls his "rational middle ground" as a useful strategy. The Pence bill is too heavy on discredited enforcement methods for my taste, but the more urgent political priority is to pass something this year. In policy terms, doing nothing would only make the immigration problem worse and push the debate into the overheated environment of a presidential campaign, which could result in even worse legislation.

Music to my ears. Because what looks bad to The Wall $treet Journal is actually the only thing that can save America to be the Shining City on a Hill that it was meant to be.

WorldNetDaily: Tom Tancredo for president

Joseph L. Farah gives Tom Tancredo his endorsement as he decides whether to seek the nomination in earnest.

And right now, I can't think of a better candidate. And, though the rest of the Republican Party doesn't want to admit it, he now has the best chance of winning that he's ever had, and probably the best chance of winning of all the candidates. And the Beltway Republicans, especially in the Senate, have only themselves to thank.

OpinionJournal - Back to Sanity?

As the Senate Committee on Intelligence votes 12-3 to send the nomination of General Michael Hayden to the floor of the Senate, the Supreme Court (Brigham City v. Stuart) rules unanimously that police and other agents of the state may indeed invade a private residence in order to:

1. Fight a fire.
2. Investigate the cause of said fire.
3. Prevent the imminent destruction of evidence (say, if the occupants, upon hearing the words "Police!" and "Search warrant!" shouted at them through a door, rush to the bathroom to flush drugs down the toilet).
4. Pursue a fleeing suspect.
5. Stop someone from getting hurt (or hurt worse), or killed.

Daniel Henninger gives a much-needed perspective on the appropriate exercise of police power in time of war.

Bozell's Entertainment Column -- 05/15/2006 -- No Passion Against the "Code" -- Media Research Center

L. Brent Bozell is, of course, the author of And That's The Way It Is(n't), which I remember best for its picture of the smashed-in TV set with a baseball bat lying beside it.

Bozell's point is simple: the major media treated The Passion of the Christ as either a social problem or as crass merchandising of Christ, while a film like The DaVinci Code gets all the free advertising that a movie maker could want. Here are, respectively, an executive summary and a full report giving all the bloody, gory evidence in support of that statement.

Actually, this is all becoming a great crashing bore--same as the critics originally said that the DaVinci movie was. It is simply another reason why I don't go to more than maybe one movie a year, and many of my fellow churchmen never go to the movies at all.

It is also entirely predictable, and predicted. People will believe silly tripe like The DaVinci Code because, to them, the idea of a Man rising from the dead three days after having been executed is just plain foolishness. The Bible predicts exactly that result. The Bible also predicts far worse persecution than a silly book and an equally silly movie.

But it also predicts that, at the last, Jesus is coming back on a war charger. And some people are in for a killer shock.

Remarks of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton At The National Press Club On Energy Policy

These remarks literally put people to sleep, at least until two anti-war peaceniks burst in and started heckling her--a display that she did not handle well, if Rush Limbaugh's sound bites from the end of her speech are at all authentic.

Let's examine this critically. Senator Clinton essentially proposes:

1. First, we need to convert our liquid fuel base from oil to biomass. That can reduce our consumption by 4 million barrels a day by 2025.
2. Second, we need to change our reliance on high-carbon electricity sources to low-carbon electricity sources through innovations in renewables such as solar and wind, as well as carbon dioxide sequestration.
3. The third task is efficiency: getting much more from the cars, buildings, power plants, manufacturing processes we have....
4. [T]oday I'll be introducing legislation for a strategic energy fund. We need a serious commitment from government to prioritize advanced energy and a commitment from our oil companies to reinvest their unanticipated profits into our shared energy future....
5. Overhaul our energy taxes...

All right, one at a time:

1. Does biomass exist? Yes, it does. You can even convert an existing Diesel engine to run on vegetable oil, either freshly pressed or (within reason) the oil that would go to waste from a restaurant. But: don't even think of trying to convert enough acreage to the production of biomass. You will not have enough arable land left to so much as feed your own people, much less every other country in the world that eats food that the American farmer puts on their tables.
2. The sun does not shine brightly enough, nor the wind blow hard enough, to light every light in the country that needs to be lit. The Senator made a number of statements about solar and wind power for which she laid nothing close to an adequate foundation. And "carbon sequestration"? That takes energy, too.
3. Efficiency: oh, you mean wear sweaters at home during the winter, same as Jimmy Carter had us do? That will go only so far. You still need energy production.
4. Strategic energy fund: shades of Synfuels Corp! Well do I remember the CEO of Synfuels complaining to Congress about how he couldn't afford his expensive Connecticut home out of his salary. Even a Democratic Congressman practically spat on him. I quote:"I have no sympathy for you or the way this thing started." More to the point: Synfuels produced nothing at all. Reagan shut it down, and I see no reason to start it again.
5. Overhauling taxes, to a Democrat, always means raising them. The best thing they do is tax. That is their track record, and I see no reason to trust them now to do anything different.

If the Senator were at all serious about energy policy, then she would relieve some of the regulatory burden on nuclear energy, and even pass some indemnify-and-hold-harmless measures to combat the legacy of round upon round of lawsuits based on nothing more substantive than people being scared that the nuclear reactor down the road would blow up like a bomb--which it never can. But I don't hear that. Therefore, she is not serious.

All of the things that the Senator is proposing, we're doing already--or trying to. (Hello? Why doesn't she call her friend Teddy Kennedy and say, "How about giving up your favorite yachting waters and letting the Cape Winds project go forward?") If you own a Diesel car or truck, you can get it retrofitted to burn vegetable oil right now--just click here, or here, or here, or here. If the market demands it, then any automaker can build a Diesel engine to run directly on vegetable oil, without any blending or heating--just as Rudolf Diesel originally intended with an engine he built to run on peanut oil. Fluorescent lighting? It's here now.

The railroads are stepping up to the plate in other ways. General Electric is working right now on a hybrid locomotive that will brake dynamically (as present locomotives do) and recapture the energy that this produces and store it in batteries to use during re-acceleration. (Right now, that energy goes to waste. The batteries have been a challenge. But give GE credit: they're working on it! The statistics on energy use and carbon-dioxide equivalents is alone worth the time taken to load the page.) I predict that next you will see a locomotive having a regenerative fuel cell that can also use these dynamic brakes to reduce the draw it makes on the trolley of an electrified rail line.

But while I'm on the subject, let's look at one of those statistics from the GE Transportation site:

The energy dissipated in braking a 207-ton locomotive during the course of one year is enough to power 160 households for that year. The hybrid locomotive will capture that dynamic energy and use it to produce more horsepower and reduce emissions and fuel use.

While I again congratulate GE for having the foresight to work on this obvious application, I wonder whether you noticed what I just did: that one hundred sixty households would have to turn off all their lights and appliances for one solid year just to make up for the energy that a 207-ton Diesel-electric locomotive wastes in one year as heat from braking! Now you tell me: how much can one householder do to save the country's energy, compared to one builder of locomotives? You might as well try to drink the ocean! (After desalinating it, of course.)

Perspective, everyone. That's what's clearly missing from this debate.

WorldNetDaily: Another prof freaks over 'Marketing of Evil'

The professor involved is Hannibal Hamlin, associate professor of English, at Ohio State University. He contributed yet another rant against Librarian Scott Savage and author David Kupelian (The Marketing of Evil), accusing the latter of "factual errors" (and failing to cite any) and the former of refusing to yield to reason when "confronted" with these "errors."

Now I have already spoken about this issue here, here, here, here, here, here, and here. The latest article (linked to this title) examines Hannibal Hamlin's charge and finds it unsupported--because Hamlin simply repeats another person's catch phrase and cites no evidence to back it up.

On the other hand, Professor Norman Jones, one of the three original accusers who had their case thrown out, did make a spcific allegation of factual error:

The anti-gay book Scott Savage endorses (below) falsely claims that "the widely revered father of the 'sexual revolution' has been irrefutably exposed as a full-fledged sexual psychopath who encouraged pedophilia." This is a factually untrue characterization of Dr. Kinsey and his work on every point (including "widely revered father of the 'sexual revolution'"). By any scholarly standards, regardless of whether one is more conservative or liberal, this kind of claim is a Jerry-Springer-style anti-factual rabble-rousing that has no place in any university. I am frankly embarrassed for you, Scott, that you would endorse this kind of homophobic tripe.

Let's take two points about Mr. Jones' rant. First, does he doubt that Alfred Kinsey is widely revered? Does he himself not revere Prof. Kinsey? And indeed Prof. Kinsey is the academic father of the sexual revolution--because only after he published his report on male sexuality did an impressionable college student named Hugh Hefner have an opportunity to read it. The rest--starting with Hefner's "realization" that he had been missing out on a lot of pleasure, and now he was going to get his share--is part of the sorry history of our disintegrating culture.

And as to the rest? In addition to David Kupelian's own response, I give you the testimony of Janice Shaw Crouse and Judith Reisman, each of whom exposes Kinsey as a perpetrator of scientific fraud as egregious as Piltdown Man.

So--no, Professor Hamlin. David Kupelian is not in error, and you should be careful what you say about Scott Savage. He might have cause to sue you for slander.

WorldNetDaily: Google dumps news sites that criticize radical Islam

The article contains specific links to the allegedly offending articles that Google.com specifically cited. I have read them. No, they're not scholarship by any means. They are clearly polemical, and don't pretend to be anything else. But I have not found a single falsehood, mis-statement, or shading of meaning in any of those articles. In short, those articles are telling the truth about Islam and its most fervent practitioners around the world.

Well, if Google News can't handle the truth, then maybe somebody else will build another search engine containing Google's rejects. Times have changed, and Google would do well to remember that the rejection of any given article by a member of the Fishwrap Axis is no longer the last word.

Revisionist History

Mr. Peter Wehner, deputy assistant to the president and director of the White House's Office of Strategic Initiatives, weighs in on the media-fed mythology on Iraq, against the backdrop of Iraq's new National Unity Government.

The Ward Churchill Report

(This report requires Adobe Acrobat Reader or other PDF viewer or plug-in.)

Here's the bottom line:

1. The Special Investigative Committee is almost sorry that it had to investigate Churchill, because people have known about his academic sins for years and never brought them up until he sounded off about 9/11.
2. Nevertheless, if Ward Churchill thinks that people singled him out for an extra look at his academic practices, then he brought it on himself by deciding to make himself a public figure.
3. In fact, the Committee found him guilty of at least some misconduct on all seven of the allegations that came before the Committee. This included four counts of falsification (saying that a source said one thing when it didn't), two counts of fabrication (making stuff up out of the whole cloth), two counts of plagiarism (passing off other's work as one's own), three counts of failure to follow established procedure in putting an author's name on a publication, and one count of failing to follow procedure in reporting research findings.
4. The Committee in effect thought that he had seriously damaged the case he was making for, say, mistreatment of the Native Americans, because if he exaggerates something, then someone else could more easily deny that it occurred. This, of course, is a variation on Aesop's Boy Who Cried "Wolf" theme.

I do take issue with the Committee's painstaking avoidance of the appearance of punishing someone for his views. Some views are beyond the pale. If Oliver Wendell Holmes, in his role as Chief Justice of the United States, could find that the right of free speech does not permit one to shout "Fire!" in a crowded theater and start a panic, then still less ought it to permit one to incite other people to start a fire in such a venue for real. And that is what Ward Churchill did.

All that this Committee report really says is that Ward Churchill is a raving paranoiac whose research product is more like urban legend than responsible, reliable scholarship. But if even that is not enough to fire a professor at an institution of higher learning, then I'd like to know what would be enough.

100 Million More Immigrants in 20 Years?

That, according to the Heritage Foundation and Senator Jeff Sessions (R-AL), would be the result of one of the bills now masquerading as a "compromise" in the US Senate. This, says Heritage, would "change the national character." And how could it not? Surely even those among us who have taken pride in the country's ability to assimilate new entrants would balk at numbers like these--or they should.

Thus I cannot understand why Dick Morris thinks that the President made a good speech last night. (I can readily accept the review of Chris Simcox, operations chief of the Minutemen, who begs to differ.)

NFRA: Come Home Mr. President

Representative Tom Tancredo (R-CO) gives President Bush a timely warning on the eve of his speech to the nation tonight. He wants three things from that speech:

1. An announcement that he will secure the border in order to secure the nation.
2. A separation of border security from any agenda of immigration reform, "comprehensive" or otherwise.
3. No, repeat no, mention of amnesty, guest workers, or any more such tommyrot.

Frankly, I don't expect much more from Bush than he has already delivered--and Tom Tancredo needs to be lining up votes for the Republican Presidential nomination in 2008.

WorldNetDaily: Episcopalians want trial for homosexual bishop

The bishop involved is none other than The Right Reverend Canon V. Eugene Robinson, Bishop of New Hampshire--the Episcopal Church's first openly homosexual bishop. Not only that, but the group calling itself Lay Episcopalians for the Anglican Communion want all the bishops who voted to consecrate him to stand trial as well. And if this does not happen, they want the Archbishop of Canterbury to withdraw his recognition of the Episcopal Church as the American Province of the Anglican Communion and, in effect, name a new Primate of America.

I regret to say that it is too late for that sort of thing. It was too late back in the days of Otis Pike, and it was certainly too late in the days of The Rt. Rev. John Shelby Spong, Bishop of Newark. The Bible does not even give any warrant for dioceses and archdioceses, such as those found in the Roman Catholic Church, or for Anglican provinces, which are the Anglican equivalent of archdioceses.

So what, you ask, do I recommend? Get out of the Anglican Communion altogether. Don't mess with it anymore. Be separate, be not unequally yoked, and come out of Babylon the Little.

WorldNetDaily: Muslims fear 'United 93' backlash

At issue: a middle-aged couple, having just seen the motion picture United 93, happened to spot three Muslim women wearing the traditional hijab as they, the couple, exited the theater. First they asked whether the three women were Muslims, and the women told them "yes." The couple then, according to one of the women involved, hurled vulgar and obscene invective at them, to the effect that they should shed their modest garb and betake themselves out of the country.

The trouble was that the raconteuse of this incident happened to be the office manager for the Arizona chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

Now I don't condone the use of vulgarism or obscenity. And shouting invective at random serves no useful purpose.

But if CAIR is worried about a backlash from the movie, then they ought to consider that the movie recounts a real event--and that they themselves have ties to terrorism, even though no one has yet shown that they provided any logistical support to the hashshasheen of 9/11.

In other words: if you can't do the time, don't do the crime--nor associate with those who commit crimes of that kind.

WorldNetDaily: Al-Qaida: Destroy Denmark, France

So much for a "religion of peace"--and for the French policy of appeasement. Appeasement never buys permanent peace. As Rush Limbaugh recently said, a tiger is a tiger--and a terrorist is a terrorist.

WorldNetDaily: Color-coded cronyism at DHS

The spectacle of the US Border Patrol informing Mexico of the activities and deployments of the Minutemen is but the latest example, and not even the sorriest. And the left are afraid of this bunch? How do you say "Keystone Kops" in Russian?

'Get Out of San Francisco' - Christianity Today Magazine

That's what San Francisco's Board of Supes said to 25,000 Christian youth who rallied against the anti-Christian influences of the culture.

The last time the Supes did this, they got sued. They lost--partly because the case wound up before the Ninth Circus, but also because the Supes didn't do anymore than bellow in their resolution--as they did this time. Merely saying that the Christians should get out of San Francisco is not the same as legally banishing them from San Francisco.

The flip side of that is that they can bellow all they want, but the youth will come back, and back, and back.

But the time will come when a government at some level--and not merely the San Francisco County Board of Supervisors--will not merely banish Christians, but arrest them. That will occur, of course, when they are "worshiping the monster." [Revelation 13:4]

WorldNetDaily: Lawmaker denounces cross removal

Not only that, but California Senator Jim Batten (R-San Diego?) is introducing legislation to nullify the latest order of the court in the matter of the San Diego cross.

By the way: at one point the city simply sold the whole parcel to a private charity, who then relandscaped it and added three thousand additional veterans' plaques. This shows that private organizations can do things better and faster than can the government. Unhappily, the Ninth Circus ruled the sale unconstitutional--thus proving that they're only interested in atheistic, or even blasphemous, results.

"Uncommon Sense" - � A Day Without Illegal Immigrants

Representative Tom Tancredo (R-CO) lays it on the line, with hard statistics, too.

WorldNetDaily: Persecuted librarian censored again

Specifically, Scott Savage, the librarian at OSU's Mansfield campus, received an invitation from the American Library Association to write about his experiences there. He turned in his essay to the ALA, and at first they said they'd publish it. But then they told him to cut it in half. Rather than risk leaving out key contexts for his actions, he published it instead in the Commentary section of WorldNetDaily. And here it is.

WorldNetDaily: Cleric says Christians 'adopted Satan as God'

The cleric involved is a Muslim cleric, not a Christian amillennialist or postmillennialist. Anyone familiar with Christian eschatology might at first suspect that the notion that those who support Israel are following Satan rather than God must come from some extreme sub-sect of the Dutch Reformed school. (Sadly, Martin Luther earned a nasty reputation for being anti-Jewish, and the notion that the Christian church has properly replaced Israel in God's affections is straight out of Dutch Reformed teaching and similar "replacement theologies.")

But this comes from a senior cleric in the Palestinian Authority, and is nothing more than an excuse to persecute Christian and Jew alike in PA-controlled territories.

I'll thank any Muslim cleric to keep his fatwas to himself, so long as the Koran contains words that exhort its readers to commit murder and treason. And I especially repudiate words like these.

WorldNetDaily: Americans fight back against illegals influx

They're doing it on-line, with everything from merchandising to a listing of firms that either hire or refuse to hire illegal aliens. You can even report illegal aliens for the price of a mouse click and a ten-spot. And, of course, you can go to this one-stop shop for information on the problem of illegal immigration, and why it is a problem.

Not to mention, of course, the Minutemen.

OpinionJournal - Peggy Noonan: They Should Have Killed Him

Meaning that Zacharias Moussaoui should have been sentenced to death. That the jury could not bring itself to do so is probably because too many people have forgotten that certain crimes deserve death. First-degree murder, even of one person, is one of them. Treason, and particularly that form of treason known as "levying war against" the United States, is another.

The reason is simple, though not what people think. The purpose of capital punishment is not so much to deter other people from committing a like offense, though it does in fact have that effect, liberal denials notwithstanding. But the real purpose is to deter the particular convict from repeating his offense. The convict makes that necessary because he has, by definition, crossed a key line in his behavior. Most human beings have a very difficult time even contemplating the taking of the life of another human being. But when you've done it once, doing it again is far easier. Therefore, a deliberate murderer is the most dangerous creature in any society, and must be destroyed. Especially when the convict not only shows no remorse, but furthermore refuses to admit that he did anything wrong. Which is what Zacharias Moussaoui has always done and continues to do.

Let's Othercott Da Vinci - Christianity Today Movies

Barbara Nicolosi, the head of Act One, a project intended to train Christians to write saleable screenplays, pans the recently released motion picture The Da Vinci Code. The word "othercott" is a jocular play on the word boycott, an obvious reference to the May Day immigration protests.

(You noticed that I didn't have much to say about those. Mostly because I never noticed a thing. Traffic was a little lighter than I expected, but not so light that I would conclude that a lot of illegal motorists suddenly decided to stay off the road. But I digress.)

Back to The Da Vinci Code: the producers of that film must be having ulcers by now. A scant few weekends before it's due to come out, Sixty Minutes produced this segment on the so-called Priory of Sion. Their conclusion: that the Priory of Sion and every "finding" connected with it are total frauds.

Add to it that Jesus Christ is still the Best-attested Figure in human history, that His Birth, Ministry, Crucifixion and Resurrection were all predicted well in advance of the actual events (no less than four hundred fifty-six times), and that the probability of only forty-eight of these predictions about Him coming to pass by chance alone is equal to ten to the power of minus one hundred fifty-seven--which amounts to one part in ten thousand quinquagintillion! (It's also ten times the thirty-ninth power of a myriad, for all you Hellenic readers out there.)

So am I planning on "engaging" this movie, or the book that forms its basis? No. I am not a professional literary critic. Whenever I do literary criticism, it's for the love of it--and I can find in myself no "love" for reading an atheist tract like that, that turns out to have its entire basis in lies, as even a secularistic journalist finds himself forced to agree.

MEMRI: Arab Reformists Under Threat by Islamists: Bin Laden Urges Killing of 'Freethinkers'

The link has words from the camel's mouth--specifically Osama bin Laden's mouth, which a Middle East reformist site captured and posted.

For everyone's information, a freethinker is anyone who discards orthodoxy of any kind and declares himself "free to think" for himself. These two articles from Wikipedia offer more detail and links.

As you can well imagine, I don't have patience with freethinkers either--because I don't consider their thought to be as "free" as they make it out to be. They inevitably ignore, discount, or disrespect probabilistic and other evidence for the Divine foundation (and youth) of the world, and the absolute reliability of Divine prophecy.

That said, I would never require the death of such a person. Far from it! Anyone who dies without knowing Jesus Christ is doomed to spend eternity in a place that I would not wish on my worst enemy.

But orthodox Islam does demand the deaths of such people--and I would advise all the leftist anti-war people in the West to weigh Osama bin Laden's expressions of his intentions and desires far more carefully than they have done.

Back in 1941, Adolf Hitler made the mistake of invading Russia. Not only did he doom his army to practically being buried in snow, but he also alienated the anti-war Left in the USA--which movement began to howl for war even before Pearl Harbor. I wonder: what sort of terrorist strike will it take to shock the anti-war Left today?

WorldNetDaily: Founder of Minutemen targets run for president

The man involved is Jim Gilchrist, not Chris Simcox, who has been at the forefront of Minuteman operations for the last year.

He and the Constitution Party look like a near-perfect fit. On three issues--unlawful presence in the country, the role of an irregular militia, and the right to keep and bear arms--Jim Gilchrist represents a direct practical application of principle. Why wouldn't the CP's have him bear their standard? (And in fact, they're highly enthusiastic about the idea.)

The article also mentions that Rasmussen survey I spoke about earlier--the one suggesting that a third-party ticket running on a border-security platform would tie the Democrats and defeat the Republicans in the popular vote. The problem: that survey made no projections on whether that hypothetical third party could carry any States, thus electing delegates to the Electoral College. (See also here.) If all that Mr. Gilchrist did was to tip the scales toward the Democrats--well, for one thing, the movement to abolish the Electoral College would die, but for another, the Democrats would create a worse problem.

Still, this is the best opportunity that any third party has ever had. Most third parties spring up when the two major parties are slow to recognize new issues and voting blocs. They then die when the majors co-opt their issues and blocs. But this time, the two major parties are ignoring the immigration issue--which is not the way to make a third party go away. You can safely ignore an issue only when it isn't important to a large enough group of voters--and if Rasmussen's data are at all accurate, that assumption is totally untenable.

If today's boycott/general strike provokes the kind of backlash I predict, then you can expect to hear more from the Minutemen and possibly the CP. Stay tuned.

OpinionJournal: Against the Boycott Agenda

Unhappily, The Wall $treet Journal isn't coming out against the underlying agenda of the boycott. They have traditionally favored open borders, in the belief that no nation has the inherent right to inhibit the free flow of either labor or capital, either within or without. Nor is this an editorial against the boycott itself. Rather, John Fund is taking excruciating pains to point out that not all illegal-immigrant advocates favor today's (May 1) planned boycott/general strike as the best way to dramatize their issue.

Mr. Fund also points out, and this is the first time for the Journal, that many illegal-immigrant advocates, and especially boycott/general strike organizers, have agendae that go far beyond any free-flow-of-labor question. Well, duh! I could have told Mr. Fund and the Journal that years ago! Full disclosure, in fact, now compels me to mention that I once sent in letter after letter to the editors of the Journal, pointing out how wrong they were on the subject of immigration. They never published a single one of them. They are not in the habit of publishing anything that disagrees with their stated editorial position. Few newspapers are. (To their credit, WorldNetDaily is in that habit. And the fastest way to "get through" to most conservative radio talkers is to say that you disagree with their stated positions, and the more vehemently the better.)

And only now does the Journal realize that the agenda of illegal-immigration advocates goes far beyond the free flow of labor? Where have they been? Many other voices now state that they do not want American citizenship so much as work permits--or else they want to get into a position to demand a plebiscite to retro-cede the American Southwest back to Mexico.

If I were the President, I would formally ask the Minutemen to show up at these rallies, stop and ask people for immigration papers, and make citizen's arrests. Indeed, every State in the Union allows its citizens and lawful residents to arrest someone if the police ask them to--or if they bear direct witness to felonious acts. Talk about missed upportunity...!